Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips When teaching and demonstrating systems, it is better if there are errors. Teaching how to use a system is better when there are errors. No, that prior sentence is not a typo. I want errors to appear when I am showing a person how to use a system—anything from software to a […]

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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 There are many tasks that are difficult and require fine motor control and dexterity. They are darn near impossible—unless you have a tool. A few years ago, we were building a system that had a sensor. The sensor would sense the state of an other system and relay signals to a processor. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I find a little trick that helps me write something “for the record” each day. I write. I tell myself that every day. Most days that is true. Most days I will write something of some substance or “for the record.” I have worked from home for the past six months (almost […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We review some fundamental concepts of programming and building things using any other technique. Now and then in conversations with well-learned and well-accomplished persons, I find that they lack in some of the basics I had the privilege to learn many years ago. It seems that we either forget these or never […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If something is really bad, it is probably broken, not just really bad. Remedies are available. I once knew a person at work who hated vegetables. He knew, however, that he should eat some now and then because, as everyone will tell you, vegetables “are good for you.” So, one day he […]

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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 Systems engineering consumes resources. It isn’t “real engineering.” It, however, is usually necessary. Systems engineering—one part of it—enables us to record what everything is and what everything does. But we already know that, duh! Or do we? Consider an organization with three or 33 software systems. What does #1 do? #2?…#33? How […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Beware of those who provide large numbers. Is anyone asking, let alone answering, the next question? Many times in my endeavors I have heard persons proudly quote large numbers. “We are bringing in gazilli-tera-humongous bytes of data every day!” “We can access the data on every grain of sand on every beach […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Makers of systems might consider an old, old list when considering the -ilities or non-functional requirements. “This system is fool proof!” said one person. The other person replied, “I know some pretty big fools.”—paraphrase from something written somewhere at sometime. Considering the “fool proof” system brought to my mind a few questions […]

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