When I was in high school in college, I worked a lot of different part-time jobs in the restaurant industry, usually in the back of the house. And in fact, a lot of the lessons that I still use today, I learned from that industry. You might’ve seen my relate these lessons in some of […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Lately, I’ve found that I’ve been using a particular analogy a lot. The analogy is, let’s say your customers are race car teams. NASCAR, Formula One, Monster Truck, whatever. But the point is, a race car team, at the enterprise scale, needs many things working together. A race car team is not just a car. […]
Let’s do an introspective exercise. If someone asked you, what do you actually DO at your job, what would you say? If you were to ask someone else the same question, most people would probably say, “I build X”, “I maintain Y”, or “I provide service Z”, something like that. But what’s interesting is, in […]
A phenomenon I see quite frequently is people underpricing themselves. They are convinced that they need to price low in order to win a contract, or convince a client to commit. This is probably true to a degree, but as a business leader or owner you still have to look at your own financials. Let’s […]
I was doing some online reading and coming across several articles that talked about the skyrocketing prices of, well, everything nowadays. Now I don’t think that this is anything particularly new, prices have been going up since forever, but it did spin my brain off into an interesting chain of thought. Once upon a time, […]
I had a thought the other day when I was staring out the window, pondering. I was thinking about the shift of a technology from a developing phase to a ubiquitous phase. At what point does a technology or service just become a basic utility? This is showing my age a bit, but I remember […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 