Brandon Gillespie

Technocrat and Author of Sci-fi / Fantasy (Riders of the Stars series).

Are we at the end of the golden age of the hacker?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Clarke’s Law #3 Technology is always in a cycle of abstraction/simplification as complex systems are standardized. My grandfather is one of the three people on the variable magnetron patent that helped microwaves become mainstream. He told me 15 years ago

Demystifying Elixir Macros

Macros in elixir are one of the more challenging concepts to understand, and many people simply say "don't use them" because of this. The key to understanding macros is to also understand a little of how compilers work. Compilers, Bytecode, Transpiling Code comes in several levels,

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, but it is an interesting and common perspective shared by engineers. A constant challenge faced by software

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 you claim to be? - Your Username * Authentication - Can you prove you are that

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 we face in tech. Have you ever felt it's easier to just double the estimate,

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 in the way we used to manage software, in the world of monolithic/waterfall software delivery — and

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 it to the computer and all of your devices in a unified interface. However, if not used

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 aren't technical, how can you tell the quality people from the fakers? In many other

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 productive manner because they can easily digress with different personality types. Meetings are critical to good communication

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 - taking care of people in our charge, not being in charge * 7:32 - What Empathy

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--while it is more memory efficient, better with streams, parallel processing and concurrency than Ruby the gains are actually simply

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 is listed in an outline format, many consider it a waterfall tool. See also: the Agile Deceit.

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 container to configure your running service. I would contend this does not mandate OS Environment variables, but

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 the body). Jordan Peterson calls this fractional subset the horrible people, for who else could

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 be one source of authority defining how a person wishes to be authenticated. * Having the government "

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 any authentication. When you log in to a website, you are asked for a username AND password.

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 individually. * Freeze at Equifax * Freeze at TransUnion (plus more info) * Freeze at Experian * ChexSystems And, if you

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 a part of our behavior. Its pattern is found in many places, such as the UX movement.

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 idea of what we are talking about (a TL;DR problem). Because of this, I think a

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 the norm is the frequency of men, what we don't recognize is how

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 differently. There are modern tools (Splunk, ELK stacks) to help aggregate data together, but this becomes highly

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 pattern for containers is one process per container. This is a simplified statement explaining one of the

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 they are a different paradigm. Containers help DevOps achieve its full potential when done right. But to

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 this to be a positive experience for all. 1. Hyper Communicate First and foremost, when working remotely,