Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips If you want something in return for something, state that contract first. Person A: Guess what? blah blah blah. Person B: Oh my goodness. Person A: You can’t tell anyone what I just told you. Person B: Why not? Person A: Because. Person B: You should have stated the non-disclosure agreement before […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Where will we go for discourse on the Internet? Semi-public groups for forums work. I like Seth Godin’s recent short essay on trust and how folks use the Internet. Godin described the early (1970s) online interaction as, “Because each of these groups were high-trust communities, it was easy to conclude that the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I guess we haven’t changed much from the day of the snake oil salesman rolling through town with his mule-drawn wagon. There is something about transience and lack of integrity that tend to make the two close partners. If we have transience, we lack integrity. Back in the old days, or at […]

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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 One of the ultimate compliments at work is, “We’ll do fine without you.” If you want to be indispensable, do a really bad job. It may seem backwards, but we can do without our best employees. Of course, this all depends on the definition we use for “best” and “good.” Our best […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Once again, the price of tools has fallen dramatically. This has shifted the place of work, and we are struggling to adapt. A few weeks ago, I went to a seminar where I connected a $100 gadget from Nvidia to a four-year-old $1,000 portable computer from Apple, used a bunch of $0 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technology enables us to fake photos and videos. We can make anyone appear to say and do anything. Preventing such is quite simple. Someone makes a deep fake video of me saying and doing something I neither said nor did. How do I disprove it? “You know me. You know I wouldn’t […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Have we sunk so low that we give prizes to those who teach that lying and theft are wrong? Back in medieval times when I was in college and used punch cards for computer input…professors used to joke about (or so it went), “So and so was a programmer for such and […]

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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 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of the best-written pieces were done “on the spur of the moment” at a writing event. That includes week-long events and one-hour events. The summary above is true in my experience. I have read pieces written in five-minute exercises, “Okay, everyone write. I will ring the bell in five minutes or […]

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