Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips History repeats itself as the computer can be fully occupied by the efforts of just a few programmers. There was a time in computing history when there were few programmers. The computers weren’t powerful. A couple of programmers could keep a big computer busy all the time. Then the computers became more […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Working with text and changing file formats just got a lot easier. This little essay was written to be posted in a WordPress blog. I have been doing this blog writing bit for a few years and have over 1,800 posts. Seems like a lot, but a couple of posts a week […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Remembering Chuck Norris and his influence on one American family. Chuck Norris died a few days ago at age 86. To some, Mr. Norris was an American hero of the last half century. To some, Mr. Norris was a caricature of something funny. Mr. Norris affected my family in ways that bring […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Another rant about writing that makes no sense (to me). This system uses three times less (memory, weight, time, space, effort, and whatever) than that system. I understand what it means to use three times more weight (15 pounds instead of 5 pounds), but what does it mean to use three times […]

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by Dwayne Phillips These new tools, ahem all that AI, are boosting productivity in our work. And then we hit the bottleneck and come to an emergency inducing crisis. Yesterday and today I have been using one of these new tools (some folks them AI, I don’t). I have accomplished in an hour what would […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog. Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure. Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some AI tools increase productivity in some areas. Okay, I’m done with this task. Now what? That choice can be vexing. I used an AI tool (won’t mention which one). I completed a two-day task in an hour. Now what? Hey boss, tell me what to do now. One answer: go to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we need a new scapegoat, i.e., something that receives the blame for all the faults and mistakes of society. We have one. Ah, the datacenter. It is big, noisy, ugly, and raises my electric and water bills. I hate it. It is the cause of all ills in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The middle manager has been replaced by the entry-level employee. What? Ah, the bane of 20th century civilization—the middleman. The middleman was the person in the middle who did nothing but pass a product along from the producer to the consumer. The middleman did nothing of value, but took a good 10% […]

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