Peter Kang

Melanie and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary with a trip to Washington. We spent a couple of days in Seattle meeting up with friends and doing touristy stuff around the city. We then drove north a couple of hours to Lummi Island and stayed overnight at The Willows Inn. We enjoyed an excellent dinner at The Willows Inn, enjoyed the amazing view from our beachfront room, and woke up the next morning to an […]

I turned 35 today. I spent the day watching some TV, going for a run, doing the laundry, catching up on work, and eating delicious meals cooked by my wife Mel. It was a peaceful and restful Sunday, just what I wanted. Throughout the day, I found myself thinking about how I’ve hit the mid-point of my thirties. I was reminded of a blog post I wrote 5 years ago, Three Things to Consider for My […]

I recently paid for an online course called The Art of Focus (unfortunately, it’s no longer open to new students). It’s a series of videos and exercises designed to help increase my capacity for deep, focused work. In the introductory video, one of the topics is about Deliberate Practice. Here’s an excerpt: In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, studied experts and amateurs in an attempt to discern why […]

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share my favorite books list of the past year. Hope you’ll give one of these a try during the holidays. The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football by S.C. Gwynne If you love football and want to understand how the game evolved from a stodgy, run-first sport into one that relies more and more on passing and spreading the field, this book […]

After listening to an NPR podcast about Netflix’s legendary culture deck (read here), I decided to take a look through the 125-slide presentation to get a better understanding. There were a lot of great points that resonated with me. Last week, I printed up the entire presentation for the Barrel leadership team and we read the slides together out loud. I know we’ll continue to discuss and adapt certain lessons in the coming weeks and […]

AgencyDocs is a collection of documents and templates based on our work at Barrel. It’s an e-commerce store where other agency owners or managers can buy things like our employee onboarding checklist, our project brief template, or our functional spec document. Back in 2013, I wrote how I would gladly have paid for access to another agency’s documents to see how they did things. Over the years, we’ve seen bits and pieces of various documents […]