In 2003, Nicolas Carr wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” In that article, he argued that companies should focus on minimizing the cost of IT and managing risk (which, itself, is an argument that IT matters, but more on that later). Here we are, about eighteen years later, and IT…
Imposter Syndrome: It’s in Your Head and Not In Reality (in most cases)
Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome as, “a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.” According to Psychology Today, “Instead of acknowledging their capabilities as well as their efforts, they often attribute their accomplishments to external or transient causes, such as luck,…
Expertise and Deep Domains
I define a deep domain as the knowledge area(s) of highest expertise for the individual. If you think of this area of highest expertise as the top of a pyramid and peripheral areas to that as the next level and peripheral areas to those as the next level and so on, that very small area at the…
Information Technology (IT) Silos: The Cause the Some Solutions
NOTE: In this article, I am focusing on organizational silos and not information silos. Information silos are problematic as well, but the solutions are different as they are technical in nature rather than operational alone. In agriculture, you can see silos protruding up throughout farming communities. They are used to store bulk materials that are harvested…
User Stories: Not Just for Programmers
In the world of software development (organized programming), user stories are popular. However, they need not be constrained to the world of programming. User stories can provide value in any IT project ranging from IoT to desktop configuration management. A user story is a defined unit of development aimed at achieving a capability required by…
IoT Data Management: Data Wrangling
The Internet of Things (IoT) results in tremendous amounts of data in many organizations. This data may be stored in the cloud, in on-premises databases, or even within edge devices themselves. The IoT solution should provide a way to get this data to the right location, in the right format, at the right time. Data…
You Ate Your Cheese (Redux)
I wrote this blog post in 2013 for another iteration of this site in another time with different challenges than the current challenges we face. I chose to revive it because it applies again now and will always apply. Watch your cheese supply and get a new source of cheese before you eat it all!…
Old Skills (DOS) – Still Valuable: How MS-DOS Skills Can Benefit You Today
I have been working with various Linux distributions much more these days than in the past (using it heavily for about four years now). Spending all that time in the shell has flooded the mind with memories of days gone by. When we used to have to know our systems well to properly configure the…
It Just Occurred to Me… Nothing Ever Occurred to a Computer
UPDATE (2/1/2023): The recent craze of chatGPT based on the GPT-3 engine simply further illustrates the truths of this post. The first impression of chatGPT is “wow”, but the later realization of its tremendous weaknesses make you want to run away and never trust it again. On many technical matters, chatGPT, today, is simply wrong,…