In the past I’ve talked about emergent requirements. You know those…those are the ones where you’re chugging along, building your system, you’re pretty far along, and then you have a meeting with the customer or product owner and they say something and you realize, “Wait a moment, they think the system should do X!” And […]
As you may have surmised (or can see on my bio), I’ve been doing this a pretty long time by now. Coming up on 30 years, actually (i.e. being a technology professional, although I was an amateur tinkerer before that). One thing that’s interesting when your career is long enough, is to be able to […]
This is the rare “meta-post”, where I talk about the blog itself as opposed to just whatever random topic popped into my head. At the beginning of 2024 I decided to be more intentional about writing and make an effort to improve my consistency with posting. I made some adjustments to my work style and […]
I wanted to follow up on last week’s post. One thing I love about music is, you can explore it forever and continue to discover more and more. What I mean is, you might have your very favorite albums and performers and songs and genres, but if you really dig around you will very likely […]
Before I chose to pursue a career in technology I came very, very close to pursuing a career in music. I was pretty good in my younger years. I was semi-professional and learning a lot about the industry. One thing I learned was this: you might know about the legacy greats, for example Hendrix, Santana, […]
There’s an old physics joke. “How do you model a cow? Well, you start by assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum…” I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been in the design or planning phase of a complex engineering project, and invariably someone draws a simple block diagram on the whiteboard and […]
I wanted to post a follow-up to last week’s post. I really like looking through the lens of “We could theoretically finish eventually, but do we have enough time and money to get there?”, which is really just a practical implementation of the “iron triangle” (fast, cheap, good, pick two). But there’s another nuance here […]
I heard a really good piece of wisdom from someone the other day. I was checking on the status of a project, and I asked something along the lines of, “Well, how do you feel? Do you feel like this will succeed?” The lead’s reply was actually really good. They said, “Yes, this will work […]
So I have my MBA, amongst other college degrees and certifications. Although I try not to live my entire business life around my MBA, it did teach me some valuable quantitative approaches to things. Here’s an example. Recently, my old TV died (interesting that I used the word “died”, instead of just “broke” or “became […]
I have yet even more to talk about on this topic! I used to work for an organization whose motto was “The Constant Pursuit of Perfection!”. I think this is great. But let’s talk about that concept, of “perfection”. Can anything ever be perfect? As we’ve been discussing, we can’t even assert that anything will […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 