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? If you aren't technical, can you tell the quality from the fakers? In
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 Powerful Agile WBS Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful tool to help scope work at any level – when used properly. It can be worked in an agile manner iteratively, scoping work only as needed. A
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
Developers The Agile Deceit Understanding Feature vs Deliverable Discord In software development, there is a challenge which, at its root, is about the difference between a feature (described from a user's perspective as something a user needs)
Developers Avoiding Calamitous Data Migrations In the world of Continuous Delivery, data migrations are a looming challenge. A data migration is simply changing the structure of your live data, and the code to suit. The problem is a
MacOS Mac OSX 10.x base config Standard steps for making Mac OSX 10.x usable for a person who is comfortable with a Linux desktop and/or may use virtualization to run Linux Desktops. Mainly, I keep this for
Containers Top Mistakes of Container Implementations Docker and containers are the latest new tech "hot thing." But it is easy to make mistakes, and with the breadth of options the first step can seem like an insurmountable
Developers The Semantic Versioning Anti-Pattern The classic X.Y.Z style of software numbering, sometimes known as Semantic Versioning, may be hurting more than it helps. Semver.org has codified how these numbers should be used for some