Being an I.P. Punk - balancing the intellectual property relationship The inventions agreement with engineers creates a completely unbalanced relationship where the employer leverages their control over the baser layers from Maslow's hierarchy of needs (food, shelter, employment) to get a stranglehold over
Inventions Agreements – the Death of Innovation I was talking to a friend once, and he referenced the Inventions Agreement one must sign to work for a company as a form of modern Indentured Servitude. I may not agree entirely,
Developers Identity and Authentication Detangled Identity management, Authentication, and Authorization is hard for many people to understand. But it doesn't have to be, if you take a few minutes to understand the core principles: Identification - Who do
Simple Agile - Dev Ownership & Estimates To ask a software developer for an estimate is often a source of serious friction—some people would rather have their teeth drilled. Estimating technology delivery is one of the more challenging problems
Developers Sisyphus and Continuous Delivery Like Sisyphus, damned to push an enormous boulder up a hill each day only to watch it roll back down, those of us in the Technology industry are compelled with a similar burden
Developers Effective use of Slack People go through an interesting cycle when they first start using Slack (or any team chat tool). Slack is very powerful in that it finally brings the immediacy of SMS texting and connects
Leadership How Do You Measure a Good Software Engineer? How do you know if you have somebody good at tech, or if they are just good at faking it? This is a frequent problem many tech managers are faced with. If you
Leadership Effective Tech Meetings - Avoiding the Disaster The format of your meeting, or how you run the discussion, is more important than you may think. With design and technology people, it is important that meetings and communication happen in a
Leadership The Importance of Empathy Simon Sinek succinctly captures many leadership challenges faced today in his talk on Empathy and Perspective. This is an even greater challenge in the Technology Industry! A few points that resonate: 1:30
Developers Learning Elixir & Why Functional Matters With the challenges facing Ruby and Rails, many are finding Elixir as a good alternative, especially considering performance and concurrency. But this isn't just because it is somehow faster--it is more memory efficient,
Leadership DBS: Powerful Agile Scoping The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful tool to help scope work at any level – when used properly. But it is usually mis-understood (everybody does work breakdowns, right?); and perhaps because it
Containers Container ENV configs are an Anti-Pattern Using the OS Environment to configure your containers is an insecure practice, and we need to stop encouraging people to do it! The 12-factor app says to use the running Environment of a
Leadership Do you have good Tech Culture? Work culture is far more critical to our success than work environment, yet it is more often glossed over because it deals with the problematic interpersonal challenges that are never easy to resolve. Have you considered the difference?
Leadership Who does most of your work? Price's law observes that from any given group, half of the work is done by a minor fraction of the whole (specifically 50% of the work is done by a square root of
Identity Protection Federally Managed Identity Authentication Registry In the proposal Why Equifax Happened: The Missing Link: Authentication, it is suggested the government manage a registry; but the details are light. Here is a more detailed proposal. Challenges: There needs to
Why Equifax Happened: The Missing Link: Authentication Much focus is on our Identity problems because of the tectonic Equifax breach. There is an easy fix. The problem is that too much reliance is given to the presence of identification, without
Security Quick links to Freeze your Credit A quick list of links to freeze your credit. You can do a free 6-month freeze, or a long-term. Prices vary for the long term. You need to freeze each credit reporting agency
Designing Tech Why Is Design So Hard? Why do we struggle to figure the right way to build things? Even more so in the Tech industry? Design Thinking is a way of thinking that has powerful outcomes when it is
DevOps Four Principles of DevOps DevOps is a very charged word in the industry right now. There is a lot of information and opinions available and not everybody wants to go read several books just to get an
Leadership The Courage of being Different We often hear about the challenge women face in STEM, but I wonder how much we really recognize what it is? I'm a male, in a field of men. Around me what is
DevOps Simple Uniform Log Format Logs! Can it be this simple? If you have spent any time developing and administrating software services, you have struggled with the pain of dealing with logs in production. Every app formats them
Containers Idiomatic Containers Using a container properly can be the difference between your success or failure. Knowing how to do this lies in following a few simple idiomatic patterns. You may have heard that the ideal
Containers The Docker Mind Shift It is hard to miss: DevOps and Docker/Containers are here with a vengeance. But at its heart, Containers are a challenge for many people, especially those who already work in tech because
Leadership Remote Work Success! From time to time situations may call for working remotely, but working remotely comes with its own challenges — on both the remote worker and the in-office workforce. Here are some suggestions for helping
Leadership Et Tu Brute: Are you a Yes-Man? I worked seven years with a friend, and together we did some amazing things. But ever so slowly what started as a great relationship became tainted, and at the heart of it was