When you are a startup or a smaller business, it can be easier to tell whether you are actually making money. I recall working with a lot of small business owners and many of them literally were of the mindset, “Is there money in the checking account at the end of the month? Is it […]
I was talking with a coworker the other day and this person made an interesting observation. They pointed out that almost every strategic business problem that we come across is talked about in academia or in some business book somewhere, including tactics and approaches to address them. Essentially, how many truly unique and novel problems […]
In my role I spend a huge amount of time on peer reviews and design reviews. Recently I had the privilege of being able to do design reviews for some interns who are here for summer internship. It was a ton of fun because here are people with fresh new ideas and fresh new perspectives, […]
One of the things that we’ve seen in the last two years as the global economy has shifted so rapidly is the importance of supply chains. One excellent example, and I have no idea if this is real or not, is that I’ve heard that there was a turkey shortage for Thanksgiving. Thinking about this, […]
I was looking through some of my old blog posts, wondering why I haven’t posted lately, and I noticed something. I have duplicate blog posts! Several posts tell the same story and provide the same message. (Finding the duplicates is an exercise left to the reader.) My first thought was dismay. How could I, who […]
I talk a lot about having to put thought into things. I even have a term for it: “Stare at the wall mode”. (You’ve probably heard me use this term before on this blog.) This is when you are wrestling with something in your mind and are working on trying to solve a problem or […]
Last week I talked about the importance of domain knowledge. I asserted that if you are building, supporting, or selling something, that it was important to understand the domain that you were working in. Otherwise, you would face challenges. But that’s the ideal use case. What about the pragmatic reality of the situation, where this […]
I heard about a personal chef the other day, who provides a prepared meal delivery service for a clientele. They had observed that their goal was not to grow their business and branch out, but instead to stay with their passion for artisanal cooking. When I heard this, it reminded me of the story in […]
In an earlier blog post, I was talking about the importance of jobs that may not seem, at first, to be important. As I write blog posts, I am frequently fraught with paralysis at coming up with ideas and publishing. One of the root causes is that I want every post to be some groundbreaking, […]
Today I’m going to be “that guy”. I’m going to tell a “back in the day story”. You know, “back in the day we walked uphill in the snow both ways”, etc. Anyway, back in the day, my first couple of jobs in the tech industry were as a Unix and Linux system administrator. There […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 