Image by Barrie Taylor from Pixabay Once upon a time, a company was hired to do some landscaping. There was a large yard, and when meeting with the customer the only user story given was, “Make this backyard look pretty!” OK, easy enough. The landscaping company had done these hundreds of times before. They had the […]
So this will be an interesting blog post. I’m going to combine engineering with…working out! There’s a little saying that goes around about working out. The saying goes, What’s the best exercise to do? The answer is, the one that you will stick with and actually do! The idea is supposed to be to find […]
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Have you ever had someone tell you that? Or some variation thereof? Frequently, as technology leaders, we are driving innovation at organizations, and with innovation comes change. For a person who knows their job really well, knows all their tasks, and exactly how to do them (even if […]
Do you know what I love about software developers? They’ll just code to what the requirements or user stories are. I have a little joke to myself, that with the dramatic industry shift to everything-as-code (i.e. infrastructure-as-code, software-defined networking, etc), that pretty much all jobs will eventually one day be “software developer”. Take network design […]
So I was watching a documentary the other day, it was about some celebrity traveling the world and researching some topic. It was interesting stuff, a legit topic, but there were several moments where this celebrity and their friends, I was thinking, “Man, they just live in a bubble, don’t they? Completely out of touch.” […]
I was originally going to talk about organizational change management, and about the challenges faced and how to break down barriers and help organizations mature and innovate. But everything I was writing came across so dry and textbook-like, that instead I sat back and thought of a story to tell. So here it is. There’s […]
I haven’t written a post in a really long time, but the other day I made a commitment to myself to get back to being intentional about posting regularly. I was trying to decide whether to discuss it here or just start posting and pretending like nothing ever happened, but I eventually settled on discussing […]
Anyone here ever hear of the Iron Triangle? The idea is that, for any project, there are multiple high-level objectives competing with one another: cost, speed, and quality. And that to improve on any one you have to sacrifice the other. Let’s put this another, simpler way. You want a car that has more features, […]
An old mentor of mine told me something interesting one time. He was the manager of a team that developed software to simulate the flight of airplanes. He said to me, “I’d rather hire an aerospace engineer and teach them to write code, than hire a computer scientist and try to teach them aerospace engineering.” […]
So if you needed yet another reason to invest in DevOps, making security easy is a big one. As we’ve seen across the news and across the industry, security is a Big Deal and needs to be taken seriously. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Security doesn’t have to be hard. […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 