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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. First, where would this thought…
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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: What It Doesn’t Do It’s…
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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 visual IDEs? With XML data…
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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 here. Building a general purpose…
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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 security products’ ability to use…
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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: they are not hiring the…
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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 with doing the value-adding work…
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Know everything, then automate!
The concept of virtual patching has set me off on a small rant. If you’re not familiar, the concept is something like this: vulnerability scanners determine that PC42 in the CritStuff system has a nasty problem, but you can’t patch it for reasons. So instead, software magically figures out that exploiting this vulnerability requires access…
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Platform and Partners, Round Two
After reviewing this post on platforms and partnerships, there’s more to dig into. By definition, you can’t cross the Bill Gates line by yourself, but who should you be seeking partnership with? Developers who consult or consultants who develop? What tools should you build for them? At the end of that article, I felt that…
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Why is open source content rare?
Open source community incentives are biased to prefer developers over content creators. Open source communities are particularly prone to this failure mode. After all, the developers in the community are all doing their work for valid reasons, so why wouldn’t content creators join them? Hot take: the incentives are different. Open source development is a resume-building value…
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