Author: Anthony Carlson

2021 Spring UNO Thompson Learning Center Speed Interviews

On Friday, March 26, 2021 from 8am – 4pm. I participated in the UNO Thompson Learning Center speed Interviews. This was open to Employer & Community Partners.  this event, has nearly 280 Thompson Learning Community (TLC) sophomore students will practice their interviewing skills and connect with employers.

TLC students consist of all majors. Practice interviews will be formatted in 10 minute bursts with 5 minutes of feedback. In one hour, you may get connected with up to four students.

I was assigned a breakout room. That is when the practice interview begins.  Each student did a practice interviews of about 15 minutes in duration. The first 10 minutes will be you asking the student interview questions followed by the last 5 minutes to provide constructive feedback.  The feedback is to instill confidence yet provide candid feedback for growth.

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2021 Spring UNO CBA Employer Partners Panel

On Monday, January 25 from 10am to Noon I attended the UNO’s College of Business Administration (CBA) focus group meeting. This meeting was to evaluate the needs your ideas and perspectives CBA Employer Partners.

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Through out the focus groups questions were asked. By participate in this strategic planning process. The results of these focus group meetings will guide CBA leadership as we build on our strengths and prioritize our strategic initiatives.

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Exploring Leadership Interviews

For the past year I have been reaching out to individuals in technology leadership positions. For someone like myself to get a leadership position. I need to interview individuals that have a role which I might inspire to have one day.

Interview 1

For a  Technology Leader’s what challenges do you see in the work environment?

  • Change Management
  • Alignment projects
  • Specialization of matrix
    • QA
    • Solution reliability
    • Data integrations
  • Forming, storming, performing, norming
  • Change out of control. Change we can control. Time to do things in particular way.
  • Bring alignment to answer questions
  • Timing.

Evolution of change and new roles.

  • New working agreements
  • Bring clarity to teammates
  • Allocation and establishment.

What does success look like for the roles of Software Leader?

  • Working through challenges
  • Bring along teammates
  • Create the culture we want in solution delivery
    • Give people a pathway and lead them that way.
  • Eliminate Silos because of specialization
    • Always be a project that needs other resources.
    • Customer, team mates or solution need.

How is this different from previous role?

  • Approach project with multiple projects.
  • Diverse projects.
    • Ask on project management
  • Technical leadership role
    • Make a technical call when needed.
    • Know business value of the team.
    • Understanding all the technical capabilities.
    • Know standards

What does alignment look like with Solution Enablement and Solutions Reliability & Quality.

  • Mixed bag
  • Technology consistent approach of projects.
    • How can we get things done for all
    • Trust to work in a project
  • Guidance
  • Consistent
  • Measure reliability
  • Create framework and alignment.

What challenges or opportunities do you see with alignment with Architecture and Solution roles.  

  • Challenges of consistent
  • sustainability across of solutions
  • responsibilities of these roles
  • day of in a life
  • more focus on direction of reliability
  • direction of solution
    • what does someone need to solve for?
  • Project alignments with teams.
  • Collocated with a team.

Interview 2

What do you value in leadership?

  • Authentication
  • Leads by example
  • Leads by how I feel
  • Call it what is but have optimistic feeling.
  • People First
  • Adaptability
  • Relationship Building
  • Calculated risks
  • Following rules vs intent of rules

What qualities do you look for in alignment with other leaders?

  • Align to
  • Who are you open too
  • Getting things done
  • Great good of getting something done
  • Agreeing what is most important.
  • Transparent and open about a reason. The ask.

Based on leadership roles you have had, say 30 days to a year later, what would you have changed in terms of expectation vs reality?

  • People on own island
  • Create opportunity
  • Schedule ideas to connect
  • Lonely spot until other peers.

What is Solution Reliability?

  • Monitoring challenges
  • Strong focus for reliability
  • Go out of our way
  • Who do I talk to, who owns this

 Interview 3

What do you value in leadership?

  • Values (honesty & integrity)
  • Judgment
    • Trust their judgment when you are no there
  • Watch people to coach teammates
  • Strong culture in team
    • Diversity
  • I don’t want coaching to be dramatic
    • Realtime feedback
    • Watch intently
    • Conversations are effective
    • Seeing and doing something

For Technology Leader’s what challenges do you see in our new environment?

  • New job, leader, lead dev,
  • Most of everyone has new team
  • time
  • prioritized of enablement
  • ppm tool
  • work coming at all angles
  • work at organization
  • work with constituently.

What does success look like for the roles of Solutions Enablement and Solutions Reliability & Quality.

  • Learning
  • Create people, great project and great technical
    • Can a person hire
  • Business features
  • Education and advocacy

My follow-up to all these is what challenges or opportunities do you see with alignment with Architecture and Solution roles.  

  • Real clear what the role
  • Enablement alignment

Misc

Hunger to learn, gain experience relationships, pulled into facilitation, cross function team relationship, taking off job interview, never know, deeply caring about people, thank,

Get a high from this, what makes you have it. Make people feel better and see potential.

Find joy

Interview 4

What do you value in leadership?

  • #1 trust & empathy
  • Create those synergy
  • Can you overachieve
  • Capability to connect
  • Understand
  • I should feel comfortable to ask him about work
  • Empathy: understand and work (emotional intelligence)
  • Create more leadership
  • Honesty and trusty
  • Connecting leadership
  • Having a conversation now to find a cadence?
  • Want to coach and mentor?
  • Transform things
    • Cadence

What qualities do you look for in alignment with other leaders?

  • Have to spend some time.
  • Tour of meeting people
  • My background, what I like to do,
  • Communication with purpose

Based on leadership roles you have had, say 30 days to a year later, what would you have changed in terms of expectation vs reality?

  • Look at Business at current state
  • Pain points
  • Realized risk is how things go through
  • People and culture
  • Change

Interview 5

Preparing for a interview

  • Biggest overall plan
  • Experience and Project Team
  • Plan written out
    • 30
    • 60
    • 90

What do you value in Leadership?

  • Let team make decisions
    • Opinion on how to get buy in
    • Trust people with skills
    • Command control of
      • Leader should not get in there way
      • Reason to get there
      • Check with this
  • let people, make a decision

Interview 6

What do you value in leadership?

  • Authentic
  • Servant Leadership
  • Healthy (productivity vs toxic)
  • Trust vs Performance
    • Loss when something is down
  • Craftsmanship
  • Good Cause
  • Safe at work
  • Let’s other shine

What do qualities do you look for in alignment with other leaders?

  • Treating others
  • Assume good intent
  • Give credit where credit is due.
  • Recognize the good
  • Servant
  • Seeking excellence
  • Building connections in how they working.

What are your challenges as a leader?

  •  Going first in a sign of leadership
    • Inhibits others
    • Speak loudest
  • Is how to differentiate between employees?
  • Competition
    • Can destroy

High performing teams

  • Your awards have to match your actions?
  • Does merit match award?
  • Wanting the same for each

How to Stay motivate

  • Does everyone have what they need
  • Celebrate
  • Selfless
  • Growing and engage
  • Doe the people you lead happy

Interview 7

What do you value in leadership?

  • Relationship and Trust
  • Amazing how talented people
  • Open honest
  • Learn from each other
  • Ability to be in more conversations
  • Working for more people
  • Find more opportunity
  • How can they
  • What do they want or open and transparent
  • Team Success and associations
  • What can help guide them too
  • Perception is important
  • Leadership to emulate
  • Authenticate
    • Perception
    • First to talk
    • Accountability is team in general

What qualities do you look for in alignment with other leaders?

  • Trust and honest
  • Open to disagreement and direction
  • Diversity in thought
  • Relationship to understand where someone
  • When someone doesn’t say anything and silently disagree
    • Looking for body language
    • Personalize to someone

What are your challenges as a leader?

  • Alignment
    • Brand new to season leader
    • Education
    • Strategic aspect
    • Position ourself to future
    • Everything is a guess
  • Evolvement
  • Does a person have to prove themselves?
  • Everyone has own scale of how agile and predict how a person can adapt to it.
  • Custom solution to out of the box
  • Virtually seeing people

Interview 8

What do you value in leadership?

  • Leader is another role and responsibility.
  • Humility
  • Courage
  • Collaboration
  • People are being taken care of opportunities  pursue people to inspire professional

What qualities do you look for in alignment with other leaders?

  • Prefer work with people when you manage.
  • Limits a person possibility
  • What can Ilearn
  • Diverse skill sets
  • Take initiative
  • Integrity
  • Work hard and get things done
  • Afraid to try 

Based on how you started at FCSAmerica, say 30 days, what would you have changed?

  • Support to figure out App Dev
  • Schedules meetings networking/relationships
  • Need to find way

A follow up to the question about What are your challenges as a leader in our new environment?

  • Challenges what to stop to keep priorities of organization
  • Not burning teammates
  • Culture hit on what
  • Business owner manage expectations
  • Stay innovated

Learn Swift Omaha November Meetup

I attended https://www.meetup.com/LearnSwiftOmaha on Kotlin Multiplatform on iOS. The purpose of the discussion was to talk about how to interact with KMP on iOS and the current state of KMP on iOS. Here is the link to the https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/multiplatform.html

 

There was a discussion on what this really is in regards to Android and iOS. A sample was created to show the project in Android Studio that builds the plumbing to work on different devices.

2020 FALL UNO : All Majors Career & Internship Fair (Virtual October Fair)

The 2020 FALL UNO : All Majors Career & Internship Fair (Virtual October Fair) was held on Thursday, October 8th 2020, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT.

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This was the second virtual career fair the UNO Ambassadors attended.

Prework

The ambassadors reached out to the 2021 Business Technology Internship Leaders to a have a group session.

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Reached out to Professors and student groups. We asked to email members and know we are doing internships.

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Reached out to past students and anyone who rsvp on handshake. This was using past email from the 2020 Spring Career Fair.

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Posted on Social Networks

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Day of the Fair

1 on 1 Sessions

1 on 1 Sessions are scheduled in handshake by students.  1 on 1 sessions 10 minutes to have a conversation. I felt these sessions went faster than if we were chatting in person. I encouraged each to look at all company and find their passion.

Three pieces of advice to each student

  • Talking about self-awareness
  • Community involvement
  • Social media presence.

Here are links I shared.

https://www.fcsamerica.com/careers

https://careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/client_fcsam/external/jobDetails/jobDetail.html?jobPostId=2167&localeCode=en-us

www.meetup.com

I let each student know if I can help them in any way I will.

The Future Works Here 2020 (1 of 2) 30 minute session

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Started with FCSAmerica introductions

Asked students to introduce

Joni talked who is FCSAmerica is?

Shelly talked about 2021 Team

· 8 team members

· 4 on software and 4 on Data Centric

· Desire to learn

· Collaboration

· Relationships

Questions:

What Technology will be used?

  • Microsoft
  • Front End
  • Typescript, java script, css, html
  • Database
  • SQl Server
  • Data Team
  • Cloud Base in Azure
  • Boomi

What we are looking for?

The Future Works Here 2020 (2 of 2) 30-minute session

We didn’t have anyone show up but the Director of CBA Laura s. did show up. She talked about how overwhelmed students are right now. Talked about how all employers are seeing different trends of engagement. Some are targeting students in handshake to giving employment opportunities in the newsletter.

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2020 FALL UNO Scholars Academy Mentor

The Scholars Academy is a competitive cohort-based program that provides leadership training, select classes, international travel, and scholarships to promising and high-achieving business students at UNO. Students are selected their senior year of high school and spend four years in the program. As part of the Academy, a Scholars is matched with a business professional who mentors them for an academic year. The commitment from the mentor is to meet with the Scholars three times each semester, so six times a year (September through April).

On Friday  September 11th , 2020 from 12pm – 1pm (CDT) I was invited to the 2020 UNO Scholar Academy Mentor meeting. This is my second year being a mentor to a College of Business Administration Scholar student.

This was a virtual session with all mentors.

The session started with putting mentors in break out rooms.

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Break Out Rooms

  1. Who I am: Anthony Carlson
  2. What I do: Lead Application Developer
  3. Why I want to be a Mentor: Help People, 2nd year of doing this.

Overview of Scholars Academy

This is the 5th year of the program and it keeps adding more.

Meeting with the Mentee

Your mentee(s) will be reaching out via email by September 18 to introduce themselves and set up the first meeting; they will CC me on the initial email but I do not need to be included after that.

Schedule Tips for Covid-19

  • Best time to meet
  • Plan meeting

The session end with a round table of past mentors talking about their experiences.

2019 Android Dev Summit Day 2

Day 2

The day started with checking out the codelabs.

Jetpack Compose Codelab

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/

Lightning Talks Round 1

Managing Companion Devices

What’s New in C++/Native Support in Android Studio

Advanced Haptics: The When, What, and How of New Haptic APIs

Adopt Wide Color Gamut

Turning the Page: Migrating to ViewPager2

Platform Android Studio and Tooling

Secure Your Data – Deep Dive into Encryption and Security

Jon Markoff, Nicole Borrelli

Strategies for data encryption on Android using Jetpack Security. The key takeaways include: learn to encrypt data safely on device and use the AndroidKeyStore.

Outline the challenges with data-at-rest encryption.

Best practices for data encryption and key management.

Deep dive into why and how Jetpack Security library was built.

Jetpack security Library

Hardware backed means it runs a separate memory space.

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  • AndroidX Library
  • Recoverable errors

Tink

An opinionated guide to Dependency Injection on Android

Manuel Vivo, Daniel Santiago Rivera

Dagger has become the recommended way to do Dependency Injection on Android. However, there are many ways to use Dagger! Come hear why we recommend Dagger, the best practices including recommended setup in multi-module projects, and what plans we have to improve Dagger in Android so that you can create a solid, extensible solution for managing dependencies in your app that scales to large projects.

Dagger

How The Android Team Makes Widgets Accessible

Shailen Tuli, Qasid Sadiq, Lyla Fujiwara

In this intermediate level talk, we cover accessibility using real world examples. You’ll find out about accessibility in framework and androidX code, and learn about support for accessibility in Android widgets. Along the way, you’ll discover good patterns that can make your UIs shine for accessibility/

Accessibility Service

Talkback

ViewPager : Flip through

Logical Direction vs Direction

Testing for accessibility

Testing Code lab

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/ads19/

End to end Tests

Integration Tests

Unit Tests

Android Studio: Debugging Tips n’ Tricks

David Herman, Justin Nieto

Level up your debugging skills! We all spend so much time in the debugger, and this session teaches you about some of the powerful debugging features available in Android Studio. This talk should appeal to all, from beginners to experts and everybody in between. No matter your level, you’ll take away something to help you chase bugs more effectively using Android Studio.

Java❤️ Kotlin, Happy Together 🎵

Murat Yener, Nicole Borrelli, Wenbo Zhu

Kotlin is awesome and you want to write all your code in it, but what about the thousands of lines of code already written in the Java programming language? Or, maybe you have a library or project that is written in Java and already has been used in so many Kotlin or Java projects.

In this talk, we will look at the best practices for writing Kotlin and Java code that works so seamlessly from the other that the only way to what language it is written in is to look at the source code.

Understanding Compose

Leland Richardson

This session covers the benefits of a declarative reactive UI system like Jetpack Compose and how it applies to real problems that Android developers have today. Additionally, this talk expands on the programming model of Jetpack Compose and some of its implementation details that help you understand how Compose works.

Permissions on Android

Sara N-Marandi, Philip Moltmann

Permissions provide the means for apps to communicate to their users why they need access to the user’s private data. In Android, we want to provide users control and transparency over their data, and have made a number of changes in Android 10 that bring greater restrictions to what data apps can access. We will review the changes in Android 10 and introduce new concepts we have been working on for future releases.

Only 18% of users allow every permission on their device.

Grant a specific feature that requires this permission.

Users share less.

Request the minimum permissions that a feature needs.

Request permissions in context for the use case.

Permissions by libraries

Minimize use of location, especially background location.

Testing Coroutines on Android

Manuel Vivo, Sean McQuillan

Coroutines simplify the way we do async programming on Android. However, testing async code has never been an easy task. In this talk, we show you how to master test asynchronicity with coroutines to get that precious green check ✔️. Which questions do you have to ask yourself before writing a line of test code? How can you test coroutines that use Dispatchers.Main? What if you want to control the timing of your events? Why shouldn’t you use Dispatchers.Unconfined? Come and learn how to test coroutines like a pro.

Android UI Coroutines First

Updated Documentation coming

Always inject dispatchers

Fast, Reliable, isolated