Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

These inconvenient facts seem to be everywhere. They are inconvenient, however, only when we have a story to tell that denies reality.

There are some old sayings like, “opinions being mugged by facts,” and “don’t confuse my opinion with facts,” and “there is nothing like facts getting in the way of my opinion,” and such silly things.

Years ago, a famous politician made a non-fiction movie in which computer-generated fictional scenes were presented as non-fiction actual scenes of nature. After awards were presented, the facts came to the surface. There was this famous newspaper that won a major award with a non-fiction story. Later, however, the facts surfaced that it was all made up, i.e., the inconvenient facts came to light. One major newsroom showed a factual government document that was several decades old. It took about an hour for the facts to show that the old government document used brand new fonts that didn’t agree with the date on the document. Ouch. Why?

Much closer to home, I recently attended a user engagement meeting that was hailed as a great success. The inconvenient facts, however, were that zero users attended the meeting. The user engagement engaged no users because the users were not engaged in the product one little bit. Ouch. The facts didn’t meet the story that was told.

We can all do better. Let’s have our facts and state them in our story. Facts are inconvenient only when we ignore them and someone else brings them to light afterwards. It doesn’t have to be that way. Otherwise, facts are facts. Write a story that agrees with the facts.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is one of the fundamental questions that persons working projects need to answer. We know what we are attempting, but we don’t know the actual progress and how that compares to the expected progress.

There are several fundamental questions that should be asked and answered by people working on projects. Among those are:

• Whatcha’ doin’?
• When’ll ya’be’done?

The question for this blog post is how’sit goin’? That is short for, “How is it going? How is the task proceeding? How does the actual work compare to the expected work?”

We ask this question of persons who have an assigned task in a project. We have some expectation of the work involved. We need to know how large an error we had in “some expectation.” The actual work is always different from the expected work. What is the delta?

Several things here for everyone attempting to accomplish work:

Be ready to answer clearly. Answers such as, “Okay. You know, shrug,” are insufficient. Everyone, including the person attempting to accomplish work, needs to have a brief and clear answer.

Don’t be defensive. Everyone asks this question of everyone else everyday. No one is being highlighted for special treatment either good or bad. We seek information about the task, not the person. We seek to improve the management of the work, not review a person’s abilities.

As managers of work, clearly state these to the persons performing the work. Those persons will be better able to answer, and your job will become much easier.

by Dwayne Phillips

Though we hate to admit it, the goal of us who work in computing is to produce a TPS report.

The “TPS Report” is the butt of all office jokes. It is meaningless paperwork that serves no purpose. For a full explanation, see the Wikipedia page on it. Those of us who work in computing have important things to do. We are saving the world or at least a part of the world that we deem important. Right? Huh? Please?

We do software development, software engineering, data, big data, even bigger data, science about all that really big-big-big data, and other such wonderfulness.

Sorry fellow computing-ers. Our job is to make it easy for others to do TPS reports and other such things. Sorry. We work in a business or in a government. If we do not add to the profits of the business or the mission of the government, we do not work.

One of the primary tasks in a business and in a government is to inform others. People inform others with reports. We may call them pages, portals, or (one of my favorites) “dynamic content,” but they are all forms of reports. If we can make it easier for others to inform others, we work and are paid. Otherwise, we are just doing things that interest us. Interesting things are interesting, but usually don’t provide food, clothing, and shelter to ourselves and our families.

Want a job? Want to keep a job? Discover what others are doing to inform others. Use computing to make that easier.

by Dwayne Phillips

Measuring small things is much more difficult than measuring large things. We do it anyways and report the results with great confidence. Woe is us.

It is more difficult to measure small things that it is to measure large things. Consider measuring the diameter of a sphere. We can use a device that is accurate to 1/10th of an inch. If the diameter of the sphere is 1 inch, we are off by 10%. If the diameter of the sphere is 100 inches, we are off by 0.1%. Hmm, measuring the smaller sphere is much more difficult.

This difficulty of small things extends to events in everyday life. Consider a drug test on ten persons. If each person is healthy, the drug is 100% effective. If one sickly person joins the group and the drug fails, now it is only about 90% effective—wow, that was a big jump. If we test the drugs on 1,000 persons and a few sickly persons join, the drug drops from 100% effective to something like 99% effective. Hmmm, a few this and that doesn’t make a big difference.

Now we consider America. We have a population of about 330 million. If we perform a study that involves 3 million of us, that is a 1% study. That is a small number and we are back to the difficulty of measuring small things. If something happens with 30,000 of us, let’s see, that is 0.01% of us. Whoa, that is a tiny group. Now we are trying to measure tiny things. That is really difficult.

If something happens to 30,000 of us, that seems like a big number, but is only a tiny number. It seems unfair, but no legitimate news organization would report something that happens to 0.01% of us.

I must be naive. The news media reports everything that happens to 0.01% of us and everything that happens to tinier groups than that. Yes, I must be naive.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is the third or fourth time I wish us all a happy birthday.

Happy birthday America.

We are free to address our grievances to those who govern us. That one happens so often and freely that we forget someone had to put it in the Constitution. Congress cannot stop us from complaining. If we could jail anyone who complains, well you know how that wouldn’t work out well.

We still struggle with the freedom from search and seizure. At least there is something on paper that allows us to push back.

There is this right to due process. We do pretty well with that one. It keeps down the urge to “string ’em up right now.”

And we sure are glad that if we do something here, we won’t be tried by folks over there. Folks over there are nice folks, but they don’t live here and don’t understand here very well. And, by the way, folks here don’t understand there very well, either.

If we don’t like a judge, we can have a jury instead.

Then comes the tenth amendment. We haven’t figure that one out, yet. We are trying.

All in all, a pretty nice place to have a birthday.

by Dwayne Phillips

Information is power. It can be good as well.

I keep a steno spiral notebook on my workspace. I jot the date for today and everything I do today. I have done this since sometime in 1986. That is … a bunch of years. I have all the notebooks, so if you want to know what I did in September of 1999, you should talk to someone about that desire. It may not be healthy, but I can tell you what I did that month.

Recently I read a writer call this a “work diary.” I guess that is a good name. I just call it a notebook, and on second thought “work diary” might be better.

Anyways, the writer finished the post with, “this is data and data is power.”

I call it information. I suppose “information is power.” I don’t like the “power” part, but I guess it fits. I find that the notebook on the workspace has saved me many troubles over many years. I could type these notes on the computer, but I’ve used many different computers over the years. I have no idea what kind of computer and software I used in 1987, but I am pretty sure that I would have lost those notes due to something not being compatible with something else.

These steno notebooks are “backwards compatible” and “forwards compatible” with whatever I am doing now. Yes, “you can’t grep trees” is still true (that means you can’t use a computer to search all the notebooks). Still, this all works pretty well.

The little notebook that you use everyday and keep forever is one of the few practices that I recommend to everyone.

Yes, that Sheldon character on the Big Bang Theory uses the black and white Composition Notebooks for everything and keeps them all. Same idea.

by Dwayne Phillips

Recent fueling tests at NASA once again show us the peril of shortcuts.

NASA recently completed a fueling test for its Space Launch System. Good for them. Test completed.

The story in the link is a good one as it describes several things that went wrong while fueling. One of the problems meant they had to repair a valve. WHAT? Repair a valve? Was that valve tested beforehand? Were they ready to run the big test after all the little tests were completed?

Or perhaps they took a few shortcuts (like not testing all the parts before testing the system).

Then there was the minor issue of a fire in a grassy area next to the rocket. They felt that was not a problem, so they changed the software so that the fueling would continue despite the little fire.

I hope nothing terrible happens because of that shortcut. What is a little fire anyways? What could possibly go wrong? Why was there logic in the software that stopped fueling when a fire occurred? Someone at sometime thought that could be bad (or really really bad), so they put that logic in the software.

This is a great example of folks taking shortcuts. They see a problem and decide that skipping something will gain them time. As written earlier, I hope nothing terrible happens. After all, they will one day put human beings on top of that great big rocket and have a—hopefully controlled—great big explosion that hurls them to the moon.

by Dwayne Phillips

We have more data today. Really? I don’t think so. We do have more places to put data, so we need to put something there. Right?

I don’t know how many times I have read about all the new data we have today. The amount of data we have is BIG. The amount of data we will have in five years will be a thousand (or is it a million) times more than we have today. We are collecting zillions of zillions of bytes every day.

I disagree. Those are opinions, and we can all have our own opinions.

Fact: we have more places to put data than ever before and the places to put data is rapidly growing.

This week I read about 30TeraByte disk drives coming next year. Put a dozen of these 30TeraByte disks under my table at home and … and I don’t know what to do with them. I can put a few dozen sensors in my backyard that record the weather a thousand times a second and store that data on all those 30TeraByte disks. I can put a dozen 120FramesPerSecond cameras in and around my house and put all that data on all those 30TeraByte disks. Wow! Data. Data storage.

And what would I have? Data that has almost no meaning and almost certainly has no audience of persons who want any of it.

My opinion is that when we have a place to put data, we will find data to put there. See? We did grow our data by leaps and bounds. Our predictions were true. Right?

We have the ability to collect more digital data. Wonderful analog-to-digital converters made that possible. We have the ability to store more digital data. Wonderful new magnetic-media technologies made that possible.

More data? I guess so. More data that anyone wants? I doubt it.

by Dwayne Phillips

A part of the Great Resignation and Great Embarrassment is the Great Transition. We are in this period of time now. We think we know the end state, but things sure are chaotic now with many unforeseen and unwanted events.

We had the Great Resignation. That is still in progress. The pandemic accelerated that.

We had the Great Embarrassment. Again, still in progress and also accelerated by the pandemic. We learned that we have been grossly inefficient in much of what we have done for the last 20 years.

The great reaction is what we really have. Since work from home is now okay, tech companies can recruit nationwide instead of local only. And where are tech companies recruiting? Other tech hubs. That is because that is where the tech talent is. Silicon Valley is hiring from Austin and Washington D.C. and Boston and…

Wait a minute. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. Tech companies are supposed to be recruiting from Kansas and North Dakota. Recruiting from other tech hubs, however, is the way it is. We are in the great transition.

One day, big tech will hire from Kansas and North Dakota. There are colleges in those places and computer science and computer engineering graduates there. But we are not at “one day.” We are here today.
This is the chaos of transition. “In time…” Well, we aren’t at that place, yet.

by Dwayne Phillips

I see a trend in people using the word “modern” to describe technology. I find that unfortunate.

Just this morning, I read:

• modern data stack
• modern programming practice
• modern machine learning
• modern artificial intelligence
• modern compilers

And then I quit.

I guess I am one of “those people” who expect others to say what they mean and mean what they say or some other cliche’ that “those people” use. I am old enough to have gone through the debates about modern and post modern this and that. The use of modern as an adjective was rejected and tossed aside. The word was redefined. At least I thought it was.

Every day now I read about “modern” this and that technology. I guess the engineers and scientists didn’t go through the post-modern or post-post-modern discussions.

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) means AI practices that are less than ten years old, or is it five? Sometimes I am confused on these numbers. Then again, modern this-or-that technology usually means, “I learned this technology. I have yet to learn any approaches to problems that are older.”

That definition of “modern” is disdained. It causes us to admit that we don’t know as much as we think we do. The person realizes that, “Oh, there are other ways to solve this problem and I don’t know any of those other ways. Perhaps I should study more before opening my mouth or clicking the keys on my blog.”

Here comes the concluding part of this blog post from an old person who tends to conclude these things:

Use the adjective “recent” before stating a noun or the phrase “this is what I have learned in the last six months” around a noun. For example:

• recent machine learning techniques
• these are the machine learning techniques I have learned in the last six months

Others may understand you better as you are saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Come on folks, let’s do better.