February 2025 – Mike Burke

Purposeful Project Folder Structure

A wooden table filled with fresh ingredients, including leafy greens, asparagus, green beans, chives, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and herbs. Small bowls contain cheese, cream, and an egg. Jars of spices and seeds labeled "Sunflower," "Pumpkin," and "Paprika" are placed nearby. A yellow squeeze bottle, a green apple, and kitchen utensils are also present, suggesting a cooking or meal preparation setting.

Growing up, I spent countless hours recording Good Eats episodes for my mom to use in her high school cooking classes. Beyond the science and humor, one concept from the show profoundly influenced my approach to work: mise en place, which is the practice of getting everything in place before you begin.

My Training Triforce

An edited image featuring Link from *The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time* in the background, slightly blurred, standing in a dimly lit temple with his fairy companion, Navi. Overlaid in the foreground is the Triforce symbol, but with the central triangle replaced by a blue inverted triangle.

If I ever time travel back to sometime between 1999 and 2002 to tell myself to buy Apple stock, finding my past self will be really easy. I’ll be at school or within six feet of a Nintendo 64 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sticking out of the top.

To this day, I remember the songs to summon Epona and warp to the Temple of Time.

Perhaps these pivotal childhood memories are making me see an apt analogy where there isn’t one, but stick with me (through 3,600 words), and I’ll talk a lot about what I think makes for great training experiences.

AppleScript for Creating Follow-up Tasks in Things

A macOS script editor window displays an AppleScript titled "Mark an Action Item as 'Waiting For'." The script automates task management in the Things 3 app by retrieving the current date, selecting to-dos, checking for selected tasks, and handling follow-ups. The code is color-coded, with keywords in blue, variables in green, and strings in purple. The interface includes standard toolbar icons and a description field at the bottom.

A major component of my job is asynchronously collaborating with other people, usually subject matter experts from whom I need to get additional information or content approval on something I have created.

All of my project templates have this approval process built in at the appropriate points. This creates a common challenge: the people I’m working with are often overworked or get appropriately distracted by dealing with some type of emergency at work, and reviewing a script for the trainer gets put on the back burner. So, tactful follow-up is a critical skill and often something I’m managing across multiple people and projects at the same time.