Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips It is wonderful to see a small child see something wonderful. I sit in Starbucks typing these words on a Saturday morning. Now and then someone enters with a small child—a child small enough that they have to stand on their toes and stretch their neck to see what is in the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is worth the effort to make the output “look good.” Sometimes this pretty printing is a waste and only aggravates those involved. This past week at work I spent hours and hours pretty printing. We had “done the work” and were trying to make a printout of the work for […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I find projects that are over organized. There is a good long-term reason for such. It still is a pain for the rest of us. I recently started working on a project that was over organized. The computer files were arranged by this criteria and that criteria and the other criteria. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips When building systems, reduce the amount of intricate typing required by users. Sometimes we forget this and require too much hand jamming. I ran across the phrase “hand jamming” recently at work. I hadn’t heard that in years. I was happy to hear that some people still knew it and knew what […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips An old adage, one that I have experienced to be true, is that a person will tell another person the solution to all their problems in the first five minutes of the first conversation. Many years ago, an experienced consultant told me, “The client will tell the consultant the solution to all […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we just don’t understand when someone else doesn’t understand. I was recently attending a meeting online. This was one of those ZoomerTeams things where the PowerPoint was on the screen and the presenter was talking in a room with one of those microphones on the conference table. I couldn’t understand what […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I must have missed something in my life as the title of this post was very confusing the first time I heard it. I was being interviewed for a job. This was on the telephone. There were several people on the other end of the line. The principal interviewer asked me something […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Writing about technology on the job breaks just about every rule taught in creative writing classes. That is because you are writing to inform, not entertain. Sometimes I encourage others at work who are writing about technical topics. Their job is to inform. I encourage them not to entertain. All these encouragements […]

[Read more →]