Bottom-Up, Top-Down: Why I Build Both Ways at Once
I'll start on the code before I even have a strategy, and it has cost me rework I hate. These days I go bottom-up and top-down at the same time, on software and on books.
Tag: Digital Transformation
Most transformations fail, and they rarely fail for technical reasons. These articles cover why enterprise change efforts collapse, what separates the ones that work, and how leaders keep people at the center of a technology program.
Digital TransformationSix Months in Las Vegas and I Never Placed a Bet
In the late 1980s I spent six months in Las Vegas as project lead on the water district's SCADA system, flying home every weekend. I walked through casinos constantly and never placed a bet, and the contrast between those two…
Digital TransformationWhy Rotten Tomatoes Sucks: The Score Does Not Mean What You Think
The Tomatometer is not a rating. It is the percentage of critics who gave a film a passing grade, so a film everybody finds mediocre can score 94% while one people love scores 60%. Almost every complaint about the site…
Digital TransformationBehind the Book: The Death of Thinking
A specific kind of softness had developed in my own work and in the work of writers and programmers I know. Not laziness. Not incompetence. A softness in the instrument itself.
Answer Engine OptimizationBehind the Book: The Day Your Website Died
A client told me he had asked Perplexity for a ghostwriter and my name came back. Then it happened again with a different engine. That is why this book exists.
Digital TransformationWe Lifted a Running Computer Off the Floor
A hard constraint will hand you a solution you would never have picked from a list of options, and the solution is often better than what you would have chosen freely. We had a floor tile buckling under a live…
Digital TransformationNobody Applied
If you cannot fill a technical role, the problem may not be your pay or your posting. I went looking for database administrators in the United States and nobody applied, which surprised me at the time.
Digital TransformationEvery Call Came to Me Because No Rule Existed
If you are the person who gets called every time something breaks, the problem is not your availability. The escalation logic lives in your head and nowhere else, so every call has to reach you. Writing that logic down on…
Digital TransformationThey Hated the Rotation Until They Could Put the Phone Down
The valuable half of an on-call schedule is the part where you are not on it, and that half only exists if the boundary is real.
Digital TransformationNobody Chooses to Modernize
Modernization gets sold as an opportunity and it almost never arrives as one. It arrives as a bill, when a vendor stops supporting something or a platform can no longer be upgraded.
Digital TransformationBehind the Book: The Birth of the Augmented Human
The Death of Thinking is the diagnosis and this is the answer, following the same twelve people down the path they did not take. The practices are small, they compound, and they are what I do.
Digital TransformationWe Bought the Platform and Shipped the Workaround
Every platform purchase has a gap between signing and working, and nobody plans for what happens inside it. We bought enterprise middleware during a major migration, and while it was being implemented one of my programmers and his team wrote…