Once upon a time, I worked at a pizza restaurant. One of my first tasks there was to sweep and mop the walk-in. The first time I did it, it took me almost an hour. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was slow. By the time I left that job a […]
We’ve all been in this meeting. Someone presents an idea. It’s not perfect, but it’s solid and it could work. And then that guy raises his hand. “Well, have you considered…” What follows is fifteen minutes of edge cases, hypotheticals, and thinly veiled condescension. The idea gets picked apart. The presenter gets demoralized. The meeting […]
Once upon a time, there was a small business owner who hired workers and crafters to do carpentry work: framing houses, roofing, all kinds of construction. These workers spent their days swinging hammers and driving in nails to get the job done. Then one day, the business owner discovered a new tool: the nail gun. […]
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 […]
