I was reading a business book yesterday and saw an interesting statistic. The book asserted that in most organizations, the senior/principal/partner-level technical staff are significantly under-delegated. That is, almost 50% of the tasks could be performed by more junior personnel. This was presented as a key financial issue, because if you can move tasks to […]
I’ve found myself lately realizing that the hardest problems to solve on a project are usually not coding challenges. I work with really smart technical developers and I’m very confident that whatever the technical requirement is, they will research and grind and figure out how to make the system meet the technical specification. Because at […]
I spend a lot of time in my role teaching. Either giving presentations, coaching persons, maybe even making videos on technical topics. And something super important I’ve learned in my career is that whenever I make a statement when explaining something, is that I’m probably wrong. In fact, I’ve started saying that at the beginning […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is the rare “meta-post”, where I talk about the blog itself as opposed to just whatever random topic popped into my head. At the beginning of 2024 I decided to be more intentional about writing and make an effort to improve my consistency with posting. I made some adjustments to my work style and […]
I wanted to follow up on last week’s post. One thing I love about music is, you can explore it forever and continue to discover more and more. What I mean is, you might have your very favorite albums and performers and songs and genres, but if you really dig around you will very likely […]
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, […]
There’s an old physics joke. “How do you model a cow? Well, you start by assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum…” I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been in the design or planning phase of a complex engineering project, and invariably someone draws a simple block diagram on the whiteboard and […]
I wanted to post a follow-up to last week’s post. I really like looking through the lens of “We could theoretically finish eventually, but do we have enough time and money to get there?”, which is really just a practical implementation of the “iron triangle” (fast, cheap, good, pick two). But there’s another nuance here […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 