As a technical manager and leader, a great deal of your responsibility is to mentor, coach, encourage, and grow people. Accomplishing tasks and moving projects forward is indeed important, but you need to make sure that you are taking care of people. But in order to do this you need to have a toolbag full […]
I’m sure many of you have heard of the famous Google 20%. This is the concept that Google engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on whatever they want. The idea is that many of the company’s most innovative and disruptive initiatives come from such a policy, and it also helps with employee […]
Several times in my career, I have missed deadlines, delivered buggy solutions, or otherwise had failures and setbacks with my engineering efforts that weren’t really my fault. In two specific cases, unknown bugs were discovered in third-party vendor products in edge cases, and the bugs trickled up into our products in a customer-facing way. So […]
Some days, when I sit down at the keyboard to write or work, I just can’t get going. My mind is blank, or fuzzy, and I just can’t focus, and can’t think of what I’m supposed to actually do next. Some days, when I’m coding or immersed in technical work, there comes a time during […]
I’ve talked before about how security doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, if approached correctly the basics can be easy. Let’s start with the most basic of all. Patching. I’ve compiled a list of articles, linked at the bottom of this page, but I’ve read several times that, surprisingly, one of the number one […]
As I’ve talked about before (and everyone already kind of knows), good requirements are a key driver to success. To put it simply, you need to know what problem you are trying to solve for your customer, what your end user really wants, and what they are expecting you to build. It’s all about Expectation […]
One enormous shift occurring across the industry right now, across all industries in fact, is the migration to the Cloud. I bet if you do some web searches right now you will find a myriad, nay a plethora, of articles talking about why you should migrate to the Cloud (and why their consulting firm is […]
What is an Enterprise Architect, or a Cloud Architect, or a Software Architect? Many people think it’s just a fancy title, something to show that someone is more senior than a senior developer or a principal developer, but not necessarily a manager. A great example is Bill Gates; when he retired from Microsoft his title […]
New technologies come and go all the time, and new fads come and go all the time. But some of them, when they are true game changers, do stick. Take virtualization, for example. Boy has it stuck! One hotly-debated trend right now is, of course, the Cloud. What is the Cloud, really? Many people like […]
How can you tell if your team and organization is making forward progress? And I don’t mean just any progress, but progress in the right direction? What I’ve noticed is, depending upon your role in the organization it can be extremely difficult to know on a day-to-day basis if you are working on the right […]
