Category: Uncategorized
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English degree, Tech Career
What is the career value of an English degree in a technology career? I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in English Literature, focus on American poetry. My thesis was on Emily Dickinson. I’ve been working in information technology ever since. So I’m biased on this subject. I’m hardly…
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Merger & Acquisition Failures
Sometimes when two companies love each other very much… Companies buy other companies. Maybe it’s to pump marketshare or shut down competition. Sounds like a boring transaction as long as regulators don’t mind. Or maybe it’s to get technology and people. Those are exciting projects, full of hope and dreams.…
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Tools and the Analyst
Let’s say I’m responsible for a complex system. I might have a lot of titles, but for a big part of my job I’m an analyst of that system. I need tools to help me see into it and change its behavior. As an analyst with a tool, I have…
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Dev and Test with Customer Data Samples
The short answer is don’t do it. Accepting customer data samples will only lead to sorrow. Not even if they gave it to you on purpose so you can develop for their use case or troubleshoot their problem. The person who wants you to do that may not be fully…
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From Enterprise to Cloud, Badly
Sometimes enterprise companies try to go cloudy for bad reasons with bad outcomes. I’m going to talk about those instead of well-planned initiatives with good outcomes because it’s more fun. So you’ve got an enterprise product and you’re facing pressure to go to the Cloud… after all, that’s regular recurrent…
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It’s not a platform without partners
What are the major decisions that a platform needs to make in order to balance incentivizing development vs. maintaining quality and control over their 3rd party app marketplace? Let’s look at this on three scales, in which the right answer for a given team is somewhere between two unrealistic and…
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GDPR is great for Facebook and Google
GDPR is going to be great for Facebook and Google. “Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public.” — Norton’s Law. See Haunted By Data by Maciej Cegłowski and The State of Artificial Intelligence by Andrew Y Ng for more background and viewpoints. Picture two types of data store, public…
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AppleScript Crash notifier
Say you’re on OSX and working with some C++ software that might crash when bugs are found… and say you don’t want to tail or search the voluminous logs just to know whether there’s crashes to investigate. The crashes will show up in the Console application, but it destroys your…
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Where’s the Product in AI?
AI & ML products are harder than they look AI tech is obviously overhyped, and conflating with ideas from science fiction and religion. I prefer using terms like Machine Intelligence and Cognitive Computing, just to avoid the noise. But if we strip away the most unrealistic stuff, there’s some interesting…
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Splunk Apps and Add-ons
Note, this is old stuff now… but legacy lives on even when new solutions become available. What are Splunk Apps and Add-ons? What’s the difference? https://docs.splunk.com/Splexicon:App https://docs.splunk.com/Splexicon:Addon If you’re still confused… it’s not just you. The confusion roots back to fundamental disagreements on approach that are encoded into every product…
