Category: Lessons Learned


Shadow IT Isn’t a Threat, It’s a Signal

Someone on your team is using an AI tool you didn’t approve. Your solutions engineers built a custom data ingestion pipeline without telling anyone. A pre-sales engineer spun up a demo feature that customers are now asking about. Your instinct might be to enforce the policy and shut it all down while reminding everyone about …

Is Luck Even Real?

I hate having one of those days where you just missed the train after skipping breakfast to run out of the house only to realize you forgot to charge your phone the night before. Or maybe I actually charged my phone only to realize that I forgot my headphones and the crazy person on the …

3 Professional Lessons From a Nicaraguan Drug Dealer

While traveling in El Salvador, I found myself in the surfing city of El Tunco. Not being excellent in Spanish made it a little difficult to get around at times, but enough people spoke English that I managed to do just fine. When I did overhear English, I’d typically strike up a conversation. While walking …

What’s In a Title?

It might be easy to think that, “it’s ok, we’re a small company. I can totally give this person a COO, CMO, CDO, or whatever title you are considering them for.”  Unless you are completely certain of the this individual’s skill set and that they will be able to deliver, and at least initially grow …

Choosing a Product By Roadmap

There are a lot of reasons to choose a specific technology. You can decide based on what skills you or the engineers around you have. You can decide on a new technology because it’s the right tool. But there are times when all other things are equal and the flip of a coin would suffice. …

Community Participation

The more I branch out my interests (or skill sets), the more I find myself joining communities. I am a part of Yelp (food/restaurants), StackOverflow (programming questions), Codaset (social coding), Facebook, LinkedIn (professional networking), Disqus (blog comment system), and the list goes on and on for many of my interests. There are lots of communities …

Changing Shoes For A Redesign

The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add …

Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful

The internet us the ability to not while keeping up the appearance that we do. Now that’s not to say that you should be a know it all, but you should definitely know how and where to get information if you need it. If you use a specific open source technology at work, then you …

Converting From Subversion To Git

Now that I have basically fallen for Git, I decided to finally move my Subversion repository over to Git (this way I can finally have a remote backup of it that I am comfortable with on Codaset). The method for this was a lot more straightforward than I expected it to be. For the conversion …

Remote Code Storage

I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day about version control and why it’s necessary. So I decided to throw together a few options and a little explanation about why its important. I have been using version control in some form or another for many years. I started with CVS, then moved …

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