Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Find the right question. The answer will direct efforts. That is pretty basic, but it seems to work. The purpose of this blog post is… Well, let me struggle with the rest of that sentence. In my struggles, let me find the right question. How about, “Why would anyone read this?” or […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a reminder of one of the fundamental documents or documentations in creating systems that delight users. It is the Concept of Operations. First things first. We want to provide a system that delights users. Where do we start? Let’s talk with the users; watch the users; learn from the users, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The ability to read a product catalog does not make a person an engineer or an architect or someone who can think and reason. I have encountered this for 30 years. It is as if someone had a cue card in their hand. They spew product names. Things like: Kafka HDFS TensorFlow […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The number crunchers now rule the world. How did that happen? Many years ago I was a number cruncher. I did then what people still call “digital signal processing.” We took analog signals, magically made them numbers in computers via gadgets called analog-to-digital converters or A/D converters, and happily applied digital approximations […]

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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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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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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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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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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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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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