I was talking to my wife about work, which I realize sounds incredibly boring but we find it interesting. Anyways, my wife is a partner in an accounting firm and she has been signing up a lot of new clients lately. We were talking about expectation management with clients, and how there’s an aspect of […]
I have previously discussed the concept of “reuse”, from an engineering perspective. Something I actually learned really early in my career is that there’s a subtlety to the implementation of this concept. It all begins the first time you learn about functions, or objects, or libraries. There’s this idea that code can be written once […]
The interesting thing about not-invented-here syndrome (NIH), is that it surfaces itself in a financial way. Projects end up taking a lot longer than they needed to because some developer or team decided to try and build some solution themselves instead of utilizing reuse. Digging into this, my experience says it is either one of […]
If you are looking to grow your career and move into the leadership space, either as a manager or director or whatever, here’s a lesson I’ve learned that I’ve never read in a book or heard in a training class. This actually probably applies to everyone, but is of particular interest if you are a […]
As of this morning, I have 165 published blog posts. But what you, the reader, don’t see is how many I have that I have NOT published. I have dozens of half-finished articles written, all of them unpublished for a variety of reasons. Maybe I don’t feel like the article is presenting anything of real […]
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 […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 