Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Overwhelmed with many tasks and people? Grab a clipboard and a pencil. This one may require a clipboard with a bigger clip that has a bigger capacity than most, but the basic tools will suffice. There are too many tasks and too many people. Emails and text messages and notes from here […]

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By Dwayne Phillips We all have a less-than-perfect memory. Let us admit that and use little gadgets that help us remember to do what we know we should do. I keep noticing professional and other high-level athletes wearing giant wrist bands. I guess ”wrist band” is incorrect as these things cover the entire forearm of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Unfortunate events provide yet another great reason to use a clipboard and a pencil. My records indicate that this is the fourth blog post I have written about the clipboard and the pencil. The gist is that these old, simple tools are still quite valuable. Hence, we might reconsider a few other […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A phrase to add to every assignment or action item or anything that goes on a “to do” list. Years ago, author and consultant Jerry Weinberg gave an assignment to attendees of his writing seminar. It was something like: Think of what you should write today. Write that. Do that tomorrow, too. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It sure is hard to understand fill-in-the-blank. Or is it hard to understand what someone wrote about it? I recently experimented with Jekyll. Good grief! That’s complicated! I also experimented with Git and GitHub. Good grief! Those things are complicated! And then I read several textbooks on machine learning and convolutional neural […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Many of our problems already have solutions in waiting. And many of these are effective and inexpensive. Person A: My kid won’t stop chewing on fill-in-the-blank. Person B: Put a drop of fill-in-the-other-blank on it. It will taste bad, and the kid will stop chewing on it. Person A: Oh. … Person […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We need to have the definition. Otherwise, we don’t know what we are doing. In agile development, we value working software over documentation. Great. Now…still…we need a definition of the software. Something that says, push this button this happens. Push that button that happens. We, however, don’t have time to write that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Would anyone mind if we simply did this correctly? There are some fields of endeavor where the problem has been solved. The solution is known and many have employed the solution successfully many times. I know we don’t usually do this type of thing here, but would anyone mind if we did? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s analyze the best value of an old tool and a new one. Consider a tool in frequent use today: the smartphone. It can access the world. I can access my personal and professional databases. I can control anything in the world wide networks that I connect to just about any device. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Life doesn’t have an undo key. Isn’t that wonderful? The Ctrl-Z key sequence (command-Z for the Apple universe) is the universal undo command. Type the wrong words? Press Ctrl-Z to remove them. Deleted the wrong words? Press the Ctrl-Z to bring them back. Did something regrettable? Well, you know. Life doesn’t have […]

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