Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips People with no experience in a situation do the unthinkable. Often, the unthinkable leads to the impossible, and we want to know about the impossible. Kids do things that are just, well, I struggle to describe them as they are out of the ordinary. Here are a few examples: My oldest son […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Before doing anything else—think. Yes, this is old advice, but it still works. Process, process, process. The world uses Agile processes now. (At least those people whose job it is to tell everyone else what their organization does tells the world that they are Agile. I tend to doubt that they actually […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps we should stop teaching kids to find the answers and switch to teaching them how to find the questions. I read much these days from older people complaining about how younger people just look up the answers on Google. These younger people don’t know anything; they don’t learn anything. Well, the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often pay the tuition for learning, but neglect to learn anything. I have blogged about this before. (From January 2010) I suppose I will stop blogging about this when the practice stops. Sorry, I guess that means that every few years I will blog about it again. Is there any least […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly. I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found… The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I still learn new things. I still want to learn new things. I recently learned how to make the em dash and en dash characters in OS X with keyboard shortcuts. I no longer have to go to the “insert symbols” function to insert these special characters. One of the disappointing results […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Once again I delve into the question, but what was the objective? I find myself planning events more than previously. At least I find myself involved in planning events. And, as I have written before, I tend to ask some variation of, “What is the objective?” I have been involved with many […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult. I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world: Writing doesn’t scale. Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If possible, assist instead of advise. I worked in a government bureaucracy for over 25 years. A favorite practice to this day is the review board. Some unlucky and usually young engineer works really hard for weeks and then brings the work before a group of older engineers. The older engineers pick […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I often heard “it is obvious to the casual observer” in grad school. I even read it a few times. Guess what? That is not a true statement. I used to hear that in grad school, “It is obvious to the casual observer.” That was sort of a joke when we were […]

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