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I started my career in programming during heydays of Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This was late 90s/early 00s, and there was a rich ecosystem of enterprise vendors hawking application servers, monitoring tools, and boxes upon boxes of other fancy solutions. These tools were difficult to learn, expensive to license, and required an a...

There needs to be a handbook for anyone turning a monolithic application into a service-oriented SaaS product suite. The same things keep…

Once an austere philosopher left his home in search of the path to a sweeter life. He traveled through lands of great antiquity, and before long was told of a sage. Not only was this sage greatly respected, compared to gods and kings, and untroubled by the world, he was also said to maintain a happy disposition and tranquil nature. The source of the sage’s happiness rested in his garden, where he often dwelled.

It is not down in any map; true places never are. — Ishmael, Moby Dick I am fond of the mouse. Everywhere beset by larger powers, he succeeds with a wisdom of his own. He prospers by careful study of the world, and his profit is the knowledge overlooked by the bigger creatures. Humans may have built the house, but it is the mouse who knows all its passages. There is forever an unknown world within the known, forever more to uncover, and here is a creature dedicated to finding the cracks in reality. We would do well to learn from him, to cultivate

The XY problem is a communication problem encountered in help desk, technical support, software engineering, or customer service situations where the question is about an end user's attempted solution (Y) rather than the root problem itself (X).[1]

Yearly software development plans are my favourite genre of fiction. In the fabulous world of yearly plans, product developers assume they know exactly what ...

In statistical hypothesis testing, there are various notions of so-called type III errors (or errors of the third kind), and sometimes type IV errors or higher, by analogy with the type I and type II errors of Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Fundamentally, type III errors occur when researchers provide the right answer to the wrong question, i.e. when the correct hypothesis is rejected but for the wrong reason.

I've resisted adding a module on high-performance computing to this course for a lot of reasons: I think other things are more important, there's enough coverage elsewhere, the software is hard for...

The world is a very malleable place. When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14. Walt Disney took on a number of jobs, chiefly delivering papers, from 11 years old. Vladimir Nabokov published his first book (a collection of poems) at 16, while still in school. Andrew Carnegie

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The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints.

The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using. This is generally inefficient and such systems are often considered to be examples of an anti-pattern.

tl;dr – ‘Money Flows Rule Everything Around Me’ When talking about IT transformation, we often we often talk about ‘culture’ being the problem in making change, but wh…

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas…

We human beings suffer from a persistent illusion that creates a huge amount of needless stress: we see today as much bigger and more significant than other days. It seems like we should. Today is the only day we're able to actually do anything, and the only day we can experience the consequences of what we've already done. In that sense, today

We can't make ourselves stop thinking, but we can stop our thoughts from fooling us.

Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/crypto/data, leadership, and building tech teams.

The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit.

Slides and notes for the Being Glue talk.

This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.

#1: Don't Be a Jerk. (That is just a bonus tip, in case you don't want to read past the subtitle)