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 […]
In the past I’ve talked about peer reviews, on the idea that you will always get some negative feedback, no matter how hard you try. It’s partially the concept of “done”. As in, is anything ever done, complete, there’s nothing else to do? What’s fascinating to me is how this intersects with the concept of […]
I had a followup thought to last week’s post. And that is, that you can’t always just ignore the vocal minority either. Here’s a perfect example. You release your new mobile/web app for internal beta testing. Most of the feedback, 99%, comes back great. But there’s one user who didn’t like the app. Now, according […]
I remember one time, this guy posted a picture of himself on social media. It was at a restaurant and he was wearing a tank top (for context, this was in the summer, in Florida). He was also a minor local celebrity, a member of a local band, so of course his post got a […]
I am lucky enough to own my own home, but that also means I am responsible for all of the maintenance and repairs. I am ABSOLUTELY by no means an expert on home repair, but I have learned a couple things that I can do on my own, to save a few bucks (and get […]
Machine Learning AI blows my mind. So I have a formal education in classical engineering. What that means is I solve problems in heuristic, formula-based ways derived from foundational principles. Let’s say someone is throwing a ball and you want to know how far it is going to go. The way I would solve that […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 