The first step in any problem is identifying where you are. What is wrong? What do you have? What is broken? What happened? Why are we here? All these questions (and more) are not about solving the problem, not about figuring it out, not about brainstorming, not about fixing it. The first step in solving any problem is making sure you understand the problem.

Another in my favourite emails that I receive… Dear FirstName, Wouldn’t that be horrible, but for real, there is a person writing this email… Then why not use my name?  If I went up to some random stranger and said – “What’s up FirstName?” – what do you think they would say? What do you think the response would be? Even if I was joking (and let’s be honest, “hey buddy”, sounds infinitely better). The…

I get emails from seminars I need to be attending. I’m not sure what drives this need. Many times I feel like responding, but then I worry that it’s going to trigger an upgrade in the mailing lists from “maybe a SPAM” to “attached to a human” and then I’m going to get flooded with even more solicitations for seminars I don’t want to attend. Hello, You have the wrong person, I’m doing great, and…

“I need access to the system to get access to all data.” No. What you need is an endpoint you can call whenever you want to get only the data you need. Customers come to us with needs, in the middle there are always wants and stretching towards what they want (ask for the ocean and get the lake you need). The goal is to separate what they want from what they need but also…

When someone asks “How do we solve this?” And the solution is a vintage, time-tested, battle-hardened approach that works. You know it’s going to be a good day. I haven’t written multi-threaded code in a long time, but man when the opportunity popped up I jumped to it. I never met a thread I didn’t like.