A team goes out and installs a new lawn at a customer’s property. They’ve been there since 6am, it’s now 8pm, and they’ve finally got all the sod laid. The last step in the runbook says to program the sprinkler system. But the sprinkler system is broken, and nobody on the team can get it […]
You change a config file. The behavior doesn’t change. “That’s impossible. I literally just changed it.” But did you? Is DNS pointing where you think it’s pointing? Did you forget to restart Apache to reload the config? Are you even SSH’d into the right server? Is your code maybe hitting a different JDBC connection string […]
Years ago I worked on a software project for specialist users. They hated it. Absolutely despised this application. When I finally got the chance to visit the dev team in Long Beach, what I discovered what that almost none of them had ever actually used the software they were building. Some had never even seen […]
So I have something I call the “Pragmatic Overlay”. Its the concept that you can have an idealized vision or plan for whatever you are wanting to do. But, and this usually only comes based on experience, you have to have an element of pragmatism to it. Some simple examples are “I want to go […]
I have previously discussed the concept of “reuse”, from an engineering perspective. Something I actually learned really early in my career is that there’s a subtlety to the implementation of this concept. It all begins the first time you learn about functions, or objects, or libraries. There’s this idea that code can be written once […]
The interesting thing about not-invented-here syndrome (NIH), is that it surfaces itself in a financial way. Projects end up taking a lot longer than they needed to because some developer or team decided to try and build some solution themselves instead of utilizing reuse. Digging into this, my experience says it is either one of […]
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 […]
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 […]
At this point I’ve been working with AWS technology almost exclusively for nine years. So that makes me a bit of an expert at it. Yet I’m still amazed at how fundamental principles surface themselves within this “newfangled” technology. Let’s discuss. I am re-reading an old favorite of mine, The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks. […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 