Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Augmented Reality in 1980

February 21st, 2022 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Forty years ago I saw what Augmented Reality could do. I’m still waiting for it. Back in 1980, I spent much of my workdays repairing electronic equipment (yes, I am that old). Pull a piece of equipment out of the rack, put it on the workbench, remove the cover, and trace through […]

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Tags: Concepts · Engineering · Help · Information · Knowledge · Technology

Data Science is the New Web Design

February 10th, 2022 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Many of today’s data scientists are similar to man of the web designers of the 1990s. I think this is a good thing. A recent conversation with a colleague helped me to realized something about data science in today’s world. I thought data scientists were computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who knew […]

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Tags: Data Science · Engineering · Experiment · Expertise · Mathematics · Science · Systems · Technology · Tools · Web 2.0

Does it Have a USB Port?

September 20th, 2021 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Every generation has a default question that hearkens backwards. These can be quite irritating, but return the evolutionary thinker to earth. And that is needed. Way back in the 1990s, the world was crawling out of one generation of computing into another. No matter what great new thing there was, there was […]

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Tags: Choose · Design · Engineering · General Systems Thinking · Questions

Words per Sentence

May 13th, 2021 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This is perhaps the once piece of writing advice that has more return per ounce of effort there is. How many words do you have in a sentence? Here is an example of the first sentence of an article in a nationally famous newspaper (The Washington Post, 1 April 2021, and it […]

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Tags: Engineering · Journal · Mathematics · Writing

The Mundane Necessity of Computing (Professionals)

December 17th, 2020 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Some things are so obvious that we all miss them for a long time. Moving from experiment lab to the real world requires some expertise. To do artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, etc. you do computing. This means a lot of software work. Though not as old as physics and chemistry, […]

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Tags: Computing · Engineering · Experiment · Programming · Reality · Systems

Fail Fast, Fail Early (at what?)

September 21st, 2020 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Fail fast, fair early is a mantra in today’s knowledge work. Sometimes, however, we are confused about what is a failure. Fail fast, fail early! (Some persons say it the other way around and mean the same thing.) The idea is simple: Try something Learn something Adjust Go back to step 1. […]

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Tags: Engineering · Experiment · Failure · General Systems Thinking · Improvement · Learning · Practice

No Systems Engineering? One Result

September 30th, 2019 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Systems engineering consumes resources. It isn’t “real engineering.” It, however, is usually necessary. Systems engineering—one part of it—enables us to record what everything is and what everything does. But we already know that, duh! Or do we? Consider an organization with three or 33 software systems. What does #1 do? #2?…#33? How […]

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Tags: Engineering · Problems · Systems

Systems Engineering and Social Media

November 23rd, 2017 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The recent rash of misuse and abuse of social media reminds us of that old, boring practice called systems engineering and limiting systems to do only what they are supposed to do. Recent news reports point to all sorts of “misuse” and “abuse” of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. These […]

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Tags: Engineering · General Systems Thinking · Requirements · Systems

Technical Budgets

September 21st, 2017 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips A review of one of the fundamentals of systems engineering. We create and manage budgets of key technical performance measures. System engineers work with technical budgets. Examples: size weight power attenuation memory use RAM memory use disk time to complete an operation We are building a smartphone. We are told to keep […]

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Tags: Engineering · Systems

Software Systems Engineering and Agile Development

March 2nd, 2017 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Agile development is not an excuse for knowing what you did, why you did it, and how you did it. You’re doing agile development. You hold a meeting to start a sprint (different methods use different names for this). You sprint! You meet again at the end of the sprint. What did […]

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Tags: Agility · Analysis · Communication · Engineering · Systems