Tag: Content
-
Tell, or Do?
A product finds a thing, a situation, a problem. The queue is full! There’s a lot of high severity vulnerabilities! The message handler stopped handling messages! Now the product developers have a choice to make: should they do something, or tell someone? Unfortunately not everyone wants the same decision at…
-
Infrastructure as Code Sucks
Tasks to be done with a product can be thought of as points on a circular graph. That graph is a series of concentric bands, where each band is constituted of the people who can (have the ability and the permission to) do the task for the product. At the…
-
Using a Data Lake for Business Insight
At a former employer some of us used to joke internally that we made the world’s cheapest business intelligence tool and the world’s most expensive log search tool. Business intelligence (BI) use cases are cheap from a data platform perspective, because value and volume are inversely proportional. All the work…
-
Developing Content
I recently heard “you’re either writing software or selling it” as a categorizer for enterprise software employees, and I’d like to dig into why and how that’s correct and incorrect, at least descriptively. I am biased towards incorrect because I’ve worked exclusively for platform companies, but that’s just my experience.…
-
Shewhart Control Charts
As a monitor writer, I want to alert when a value has changed quickly a lot in one direction or another, but i don’t want to set hard-coded thresholds because the value’s range is expected to slowly evolve. My goal is to get useful alerts and avoid false alarms. Examples:…
-
Get the developer out of the way!
I’d be so much more productive if I could get rid of this other person who keeps asking hard questions about exactly what I mean and exactly what I expect! Just make the spaceship go to Mars, okay?! Remember when the thing that was going to dis-intermediate software developers was…
-
How to Make Useful Charts and Reports
There is a wealth of charting and reporting tools to use, but in my experience there is also a lot of struggle to build charts that effectively communicate. Since you typically need to put some reports into products and certainly need to use them internally, it’s important to build competence…
-
Security Products, Rules, and Complexity
Security products need to detect known knowns, so they build up a corpus of rule content. This corpus grows faster than it shrinks, if it’s maintained at all: new known bad is found at a rapid clip, while software is retired from use very slowly. There are two constraints on…
-
Engines and Fuel part two
Part One Why don’t software vendor companies make content? The best answer is that they have decided not to invest (or similarly, have not decided to invest yet). Companies are often aware of the gaps their customers complain about, and yet choose to prioritize other things. A less good answer:…
-
Do I have a product here?
Sometimes I chat with people who are interested in starting a side business, or even leaving their $dayjob. That can be a really rewarding option if you’ve got the opportunity. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with not doing it! Some people simply don’t want to run a small business along…
Monkeynoodle.Org 