🎧 Episode Notes: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth

In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a morning routine, or a specific productivity hack—it is a meta-habit. It is a specific way of thinking about how you spend your energy and time to avoid the burnout that comes from working hard without seeing commensurate gains,.

• The Burnout Trap: Understand that if you keep putting more energy in without getting equal or greater results out (sub-linear returns), you are heading for a wall. You cannot simply "grind" your way to the next level,.
• Recognize Your Default Loops: Whether you know it or not, you are already running "loops"—automatic heuristics and behaviors that define your decisions, like "while happy at job, stay at job",.
• The Inner vs. Outer Loop: Learn the difference between the Inner Loop (your execution, habits, and daily protocols) and the Outer Loop (the meta-observation that evaluates the system).
• Governing the Experiment: Discover how to use an Outer Loop to set longer-term conditionals for your career experiments (e.g., "I will try this until X"), preventing you from reacting emotionally to single data points,.
• Systematic Evaluation: Move from making random changes to making informed adjustments by stepping out of the daily grind to evaluate the trajectory of your habits,.

🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Unblocked

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Even if you’ve already written off AI code review, Unblocked is worth a look.

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The post e269 – Behind the Curtain: A Day in the Life of a Presentation Designer appeared first on The Presentation Podcast.

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma sits down with Art Huggard, former VP of E-Commerce at Build-A-Bear, who transformed the company's online presence from a crashing website to a $70 million business over eight years. Art shares his unconventional path from chemical engineering to e-commerce leadership at Bass Pro Shops, Hudson's Bay, and Build-A-Bear. He reveals how the company went from website crashes every hour during the 2016 holiday season to successfully managing viral product launches like Baby Yoda that sold out in four hours. Art discusses Queue-it's virtual waiting room for handling extreme traffic spikes, real-time system tuning during flash sales, and the importance of balancing technical infrastructure with guest experience. The conversation covers cloud scalability challenges, order management bottlenecks in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and what it takes to handle 300+ orders per minute. The episode illustrates how preparation and cross-industry lessons can turn unpredictable demand into business success.

Episode page

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• (00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast
• (01:03) - From Chemical Engineer to Ecommerce Leader
• (05:01) - How Early Ecommerce Got the Experience Wrong
• (07:30) - Walking Into a Website That Was Crashing
• (09:56) - Why Build-A-Bear Isn't Just a Toy Company
• (12:03) - Using AI to Remove Bottlenecks and Ship Faster
• (14:43) - COVID, Baby Yoda, and Sudden Demand Spikes
• (16:05) - What 300 Orders a Minute Really Looks Like
• (22:38) - Finding the Real Bottlenecks in the Stack
• (25:29) - From Ammunition to Baby Yoda: Cross-Industry Lessons
• (27:57) - Book Recommendations and Professional Advice
• (30:32) - What Scalability Really Means

Art Huggard is a leading expert in Digital Commerce. He has helped many well known brands such as Build-A-Bear, Bass Pro Shops, Tracker Boats, Hudson Bay and others move from chaos to High Growth. He has a keen understanding of the entire customer ecosystem including Web, Order Management, CRM, Loyalty and Digital Marketing. Known for building high performance teams Art has been an excellent mentor to many at the companies where he has worked. Most recently Art has formed Gateway-Commerce (www.gateway-commerce.com) where he provides fractional consulting to companies looking to make significant improvements to how they serve their guests. 

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. © Queue-it, 2026

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Welcome in! You’ve entered, Only Malware in the Building. Join us each month to sip tea and solve mysteries about today’s most interesting threats. Your host is ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Selena Larson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Proofpoint⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ intelligence analyst and host of their podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠DISCARDED⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Inspired by the residents of a building in New York’s exclusive upper west side, Selena is joined by her co-hosts ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠N2K Networks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dave Bittner⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Keith Mularski⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, former FBI cybercrime investigator and now Chief Global Ambassador at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Qintel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Being a security researcher is a bit like being a detective: you gather clues, analyze the evidence, and consult the experts to solve the cyber puzzle. On this episode, our hosts discuss how attackers are increasingly abusing legitimate, trusted Microsoft workflows to make phishing campaigns more convincing and harder to spot. In device code phishing, victims are socially engineered into completing a real Microsoft OAuth login flow, inadvertently granting attackers valid access tokens without ever sharing a password. They also examined abuse of Microsoft 365 Direct Send, which allows threat actors to send phishing emails that appear to originate from inside an organization, reinforcing a broader shift toward weaponizing built-in cloud services rather than relying on obviously malicious infrastructure.

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Welcome Martin Rowe of EE World!

• Martin is a long time journalist in the electronics space, having worked at magazines like EDN, Test and Measurement World, EE World, and more!
• Ken Wyatt
• Concentrated vs diffuse information
• Product reviews
• Unitrend scope videod
• Tek 5 series B
• Wirecutter for test equipment / parts
• Skepticism
• Webinars – 3 levels
• Martin has an HP34401 early model
• Touring T&M companies
• Littelfuse
• Martin is in the Boston area
• Boxborough has multiple EMI labs
• Article on building an anechoic chamber
• PCB East was in Boxborough now in Worchester (“Wuh – Stah” 😀 )
• International Microwave Symposium (IMS) inBoston this year
• What is driving the Boston ecosystem?
• NYU wireless
• 6G summit
• Components trickling down into the other parts of the industry
• Ted Rappaport from NYU writing a paper
• Open RAN
• 5G standalone vs nonstandalone
• Poster session
• ISAC
• Test equipment has to test everything leading edge
• 3GPP
• The impacts of satellite connectivity
• IoT still talking about LTE
• 5G modems and battery life
• Private networks
• Automation software
• The Measurement Blues song, among others
• Find him online
  • Martin Rowe on LinkedIn
  • EEworldonline
• Martin sent over some links related the things we discussed during the episode
  • 6G discussions: How things have changed. We assembled a timeline of the topics so you can see what’s come and gone
  • Nokia Bell Labs’ Peter Vetter talks 6G research Live from the Brooklyn 6G Summitd
  • Teardown: HP 8112A pulse generator – I bought this at a flea market. MIT holds these once a month April through October. I go every year to buy things for teardowns and to take photos.
  • DSL router uses parts from old phones – Heard about this from a European telecom newsletter and just had to get the details
  • The slide keyboard is back, in a 5G phone – Video interview from 2020. I mentioned the Psion Organizer. The designer of this phone used to work for Psion. He designs beautiful products.
  • Tryout: two low-cost USB inline meters and a load – My latest. This was the one where the audio in the videos seemed overdubbed. I uploaded the videos again using different file names. Seems OK now.

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In this episode of au unprompted, hosts Ryan Lowdermilk, Kevin Tupper, and Travis Lowdermilk delve into the rapid emergence of Open Claw, a viral personal AI assistant agent developed by Peter Steinberger from Austria. They discuss its early success and widespread adoption in 2026, recounting how users are rushing to buy Mac Minis to install and utilize this groundbreaking technology. The hosts explore the assistant's capabilities, including memory persistence, proactive assistance, and integration with various services like Apple Notes, GitHub, and Smart Home devices. They also touch on the importance of security and the potential ethical implications of Open Claw's broad agency. As the technology evolves rapidly, the episode serves as a pivotal discussion on the future of personal AI assistants.

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:40 The Rise of Open Claw

01:23 Understanding Open Claw

03:23 Personal Experiences with Open Claw

05:37 Technical Details and Setup

13:25 Security Concerns and Best Practices

22:36 Future Implications and Industry Impact

31:47 Ethical and Security Concerns of Open Claw

32:41 Agents Learning from Social Networks

34:14 Excitement and Risks of New Technology

35:42 The Rapid Evolution of AI Agents

38:47 Practical Applications and User Experiences

41:44 The Future of Personal Assistant Agents

47:51 Security and Community Involvement

57:43 Concluding Thoughts and Future Prospects

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aiunprompted.substack.com



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