Throughout my career, people have compared software development to “traditional” engineering, usually in a way to scold software developers for not doing a proper job. As someone who got his degree in Electronic Engineering, this resonated with me early in my career. But this way of thinking is flawed because most people have the wrong
Another year, and again I feel the desire to share a top half-dozen of what my quirky musical tastes ran into this year. As usual, my musical journeys are focused on the interaction of jazz and world music, and include material you’re not likely to find on most popular lists. I include links to pages
When working with a legacy system it is valuable to identify and create seams: places where we can alter the behavior of the system without editing source code. Once we’ve found a seam, we can use it to break dependencies to simplify testing, insert probes to gain observability, and redirect program flow to new modules
I vividly remember one of my first sightings of a large software project. I was taking a summer internship at a large English electronics company. My manager, part of the QA group, gave me a tour of a site and we entered a huge, depressing, windowless warehouse full of people working in cubicles. I was
How did you get into the bottleneck? A growing startup commonly underinvests in its onboarding process. The need to scale up headcount rapidly can come about unexpectedly. An event can trigger the team scaling – perhaps the product took off with customers, or the startup acquired a company or pivoted in a new product direction.
How did you get into the bottleneck? A growing startup commonly underinvests in its onboarding process. The need to scale up headcount rapidly can come about unexpectedly. An event can trigger the team scaling – perhaps the product took off with customers, or the startup acquired a company or pivoted in a new product direction.
We recently completed a short seven-day engagement to help a client develop an AI Concierge proof of concept (POC). The AI Concierge provides an interactive, voice-based user experience to assist with common residential service requests. It leverages AWS services (Transcribe, Bedrock and Polly) to convert human speech into text, process this input through an LLM,
I’ve been using Emacs for many years, using it for any writing for my website, writing my books, and most of my programming. (Exceptions have been IntellJ IDEA for Java and RStudio for R.) As such I’ve been happy to see a lot of activity in the last few years to improve Emacs’s capabilities, making
How did you get into the bottleneck? A growing startup commonly underinvests in its onboarding process. The need to scale up headcount rapidly can come about unexpectedly. An event can trigger the team scaling – perhaps the product took off with customers, or the startup acquired a company or pivoted in a new product direction.
How did you get into the bottleneck? A growing startup commonly underinvests in its onboarding process. The need to scale up headcount rapidly can come about unexpectedly. An event can trigger the team scaling – perhaps the product took off with customers, or the startup acquired a company or pivoted in a new product direction.