Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The claim of greater “better-ness” and ensuing failure seem to associate frequently. There is an old story of programmer who coded for six hours. Then, instead of going home, the programmer coded two more hours and made enough mistakes in those two hours that it took the rest of the week to […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the way to accomplish more sooner is to acknowledge the person and wait until later. A short but true story: We were short of persons in one particular skill category at work. Work piled up. We were waiting, mostly impatiently. Finally, a new person arrives in that skill category. All of […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips For some reason, some social media pioneers are apologizing for reaching their dreams. Well, the Russians have done it. They are the smartest persons in the history of the world. They sat back and let others do all the work to create platforms that they, the Russians, could use to control the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Question: Why don’t we address this situation? And I suggest one solution. Note the clever use of the summary as question and the title as answer. Maybe that isn’t so clever, but I find the actual question and accompanying answer common. I was recently reading about how engineers and computer programmers might […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we forget some of the fundamentals of “news.” Fake news: this is the stuff we used read in the grocery store checkout counter in The National Enquirer. My mother never let me buy one, but they had great headlines about then first lady Hillary Clinton having an alien baby and other […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips We all like to have something we can call our own. We like to work on something and say, “I did that!” We have to decide if one of us is smarter than all of us. In Agile Development, somehow the team meets and decides on a new feature or fix for […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we simply try too hard when applying what we already know in small doses suffices. It happened again the other day at work… I needed to know something that I didn’t know. I rushed about frantically screaming to the moon, which is hard to do in the middle of a sunny […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Freedom of choice robs us of excuses. Of course we are free to choose to ignore this. Most of us live in a world of abundance and wealth. Come on folks, admit this is true. We have the freedom to choose much of what we do. It is unfortunate, but we often […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips This paraphrase from Through the Looking Class continues to reign in systems development. The title of this post is a famous paraphrase from the classic Through the Looking Glass. I live it most days. The conversation goes something like this: Me: The system won’t do such-and-such. Builder: Of course not. It wasn’t […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips A speaker can lead an accepting or friendly audience just about anywhere. Hostile audiences, however, can uncover holes in thought. I recommend the questioning group—especially when the stakes are high. It was a senior-level course in Electrical Engineering. The teacher, I can’t recall his name, but I do remember that he didn’t […]

[Read more →]