Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Experts know heuristics or “rules of thumb.” Consult these folks before attempting something of importance.

Did you know that a pizza will feed three people? Did you know that you should have half the food cooked and ready to serve at a picnic before the picnic-ers arrive? Did you know that sandstone is not a good base of house construction? Did you know that diesel fuel is the best cleaner to remove tar? Did you know there are 500 words on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper?

The above is a bunch of heuristics or rules of thumb. Experts in various subjects know various rules of thumb. The experts learned these things after many experiments that provided experience. Hmm, expert, experiment, and experience seem to have the same base word or something like that. A language expert would be able to explain that to me.

I have attended several picnics that were … disasters. Folks stood in line for an hour waiting for a hot dog. The heuristics on picnics were unknown and unused. Ask experts? Why? This is a picnic. Surely, we can… wrong. Even picnics can be tougher than expected. So can buying pizza, building houses, washing hands, printing essays, writing silly blog posts, and many other things.

Ask experts. Learn some rules of thumb. APPLY those rules of thumb. Do I need to reinvent the wheel? (On that subject, there are many heuristics on making a wheel. If it were simple, everyone could do it and everyone cannot do it.)

by Dwayne Phillips

I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.”

I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days when writers banged out stuff on mechanical typewriters, there writers of pulp magazine articles and pulp novels who wrote ten novels a year along with a few dozen short stories at the same time.

Wow! How could anyone do that? Well the revision time alone would mean sleeping only 15 minutes a day. And then the review time. And then … and then … and then … NOTHING.

Writers who wrote at pulp speed simply pumped out the stories. They were story tellers. They didn’t know that the real work of writing was in the revising and all those things English teachers teach today.

Me? I took one composition class in college. Nothing in high school. My writing professor during that seven-week semester in the summer of 1976 assigned us to write in a journal notebook everyday—hence the name journal, which has something to do with a French word that has something to do with day. And we had to turn in one typed essay each Friday.

Just write.

Well, I guess I never learned anything since. I still just write. Along the way, I have picked up some rules about revising and such, but I haven’t been very good at applying the rules. I still mostly just write and then press the PUBLISH key on the keyboard. Most keyboards have this PUBLISH key, but most folks have never found it.

I recently interviewed for a job as a Technical Writer. The interviewer didn’t believe that I had written all the things I said I had written. I didn’t get the job. Oh well. I didn’t have some sort of writing certification. All my books, articles, posts, essays, and all that stuff didn’t count as a certification. Oh well.

A recent experiment showed that the dictation feature on that popular Word processor from Redmond, Washington is better now. I needn’t even use the keyboard and type words. I can sit in my Lazyboy chair and tell stories to the Word processor as if my grandchildren were sitting at my feet and listening attentively. I think that “grandchildren at the feet” thing is just a myth as I have four grandchildren and they never sit at my feet. Where’s the fireplace that is in all those Rockwell paintings? Huh? But I digress.

Can’t type? No need. Just dictate. Tell stories at pulp speed. It seems to work.

There may not be any money in this. There is no guarantee of money in any writing. But there is something in writing or telling stories or pretending that my grandchildren are sitting at my feet enthralled by my stories. Try it.

by Dwayne Phillips

AI tools are here. They don’t do everything, but they boost productivity. Use the tools.

I am old enough to remember a time in the late 1980s when word processors appeared. There were many older managers who were accustomed to writing in cursive on yellow pads with pencils and handing those to secretaries to type. All of a sudden, they had to type everything themselves. Many of these well-meaning fellows couldn’t type. Try learning that at age 55.

In early May 2025, Jensen Huang said, “You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it. I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don’t be that person.”

The word processor multiplied productivity. No one said to keep out the word processor. Some, as mentioned above, hurt a lot at work when the word processor arrived. Still, they adapted. They adapted or lost their jobs. No one was going to pay for typists any more. Type it yourself.

Why are you sitting there typing? Prompt. Copy. Paste. Edit. Ship it. Same goes for drawing pictures. Same goes for making a video. Sames goes for…the list becomes longer daily.

I can be that person who huffs and puffs and loses my job.

I can be that person who thinks about how to use new tools. I can be that person who creates when the AI cannot and then uses the AI to do all that other work.

We all have choices. Let’s choose well.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some new AI companies are using AI so that they only have a couple dozen humans.

Fifteen years ago I blogged about eating your own dog food. Not a nice phrase, but a good point about using my own products. If others should buy and use my products, so should I.

Now I note a good example of people doing this. There are a couple dozen new AI companies that already have products on the market. These new companies only have a couple dozen employees. They use AI to build AI, i.e., they are eating their own dog food.

Aha! This AI stuff must work. How else could just a handful of people build systems that are like those produced by BIG TECH companies with thousands of employees? And if you only have 20 employees, you don’t need much office space, many HR persons, big conference rooms, and all those things that are necessary when there are hundreds and thousands of employees.

And with all those overhead expenses reduced, well, there is a lot of money sitting around for other things. Let our minds wander about what to do with all that money.

by Dwayne Phillips

Information has always been searchable. What I really want is information that is findable.

Search is a topic that has plagued and payed computer scientists since anyone was first called a computer scientist. I studied search back when I was in college (we used punch card machines back then and wrote on cave walls with soft rocks).

In a recent job, we would have “data calls” where someone way up in the upper levels of organizations with too many upper levels of managers would ask a vague question. We knew the answer. We knew we had seen the answer in a good chart or graph. We just had to find that answer in the vast network of folders and files. One hour to understand the question; thirty-nine hours of searching for that one chart or graph.

God bless the folks at Microsoft who put search into the File Finder or whatever they call that software. Same to the folks at Apple with their Finder. Odd how they use the word “Finder” when finding is a prediction of the result of Searching. Often, finding was an overly optimistic prediction of what happened when searching.

We don’t want searching; we want finding. Is it fishing or is it catching fish? Is it catching fish or is it eating fresh fish?

Today, we have better tools. I am more apt to find at the end of all that searching. Good. Is this quibbling about words? Perhaps it is using words that mean something—saying what we mean and meaning what we say and all that. We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

A part of or a separate activity is the punishment assessment. What is the result of not following the rules?

Years ago, I supervised a person who always asked the question, “And what happens to me if I don’t do this?”

He wasn’t avoiding work; he was assessing rules and regulations to learn if they were real or merely just something else someone else said in an effort to push themselves on others. This is like the mythical TPS Report from the movie Office Space. Turn in your TPS Report or else. Or else what?

What happens to me if I don’t follow this rule? This can be a good question for those involved in ensuring that systems adhere to standards and regulations. If you don’t do this, bad things will happen to your system. Well, maybe not. Maybe our system is such that these guidelines don’t apply. That is our judgement.

Well, in most cases, most problems would have been prevented if folks did A. B. C. etc. Well, we are different. We have never done A. B. C. etc. and don’t have problems.

Besides, will we all be fired? Will we all go to jail? There are other ominous questions. If the answer is, “I won’t like you if you don’t follow my rules,” Well, I can live with that and many folks cannot live with that.

by Dwayne Phillips

Each of us has the ability to change something in a direction which we desire.

I guess this post is a pep talk or an admonition to “buck up sissy pants” (I think I heard that phrase on a TV show).

Unhappy with the current situation? I am. Well, things don’t have to be this way. Things could be better (whatever better means to one person). Change them. Yes, I have the power to change things. Perhaps the only thing I can change is my thinking. Perhaps the only thing I can change is my attitude. Well, there are two things I can change right there.

And if I can change my thinking and my attitude, perhaps I can influence the thinking and attitude of one more person. And so on in some sort of geometric progression or whatever.

No, things don’t have to be this way. We can all do something to make things better. Let’s do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

I suppose I am several generations behind in the lingo of my profession. Is it too much to ask people to speak English or at least define their terms?

I read this recently, “Get the architecture right, then the details.”

Hmm, sounds like in that case “architecture” means the “high-level design.”

But “design” is a verb sometimes used as a noun. “Architecture” is a noun, so I guess we design an architecture, maybe?

I’m confused on this. And then we have solutions architects. A solution is a correct response to a problem. Well, I am glad we have people architecting or designing solutions as opposed to designing more problems in response to problems.

I am confused. Perhaps a junior-level recruiter can explain this all to an old man. Please.

by Dwayne Phillips

Stop. Breathe. Think. Now act in a way that leads to what is desired.

Stop. Breathe. Think. Act. In that order.

I think that is the definition of a wise person acting wisely. “Knee jerk reactions” are not in the definition.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) a wise person told me a true story of one of their adult children who was about to marry. The spouse of this wise person told the adult child, “Don’t marry that person. That is a mistake!” The wise person told the adult child, “I love you. I want the best for you.”

The marriage of the adult child ended quickly and with hatred. Guess whom the adult child looked to for further guidance. Of course it wasn’t the, “I told you so” parent.

The wise person desired the adult child to continue their relationship. The wise person acted in a way that led to that desire. The unwise parent acted in a short-term manner that brought some short-term results. Enough chastising the unwise from some true story in some family’s past.

The same wise-person advice applies to the rest of us—especially those of us who attempt to lead people and manage work. What do we want to happen? How should we act to lead to that desired outcome? Stop. Breathe. Think. Sometimes situations simply push us towards neglecting these steps and this order. We have an emergency, or at least we think we have an emergency that needs a knee-jerk reaction (why do we blame our knees?).

Let’s do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

Instead of wiggling around so we can call our efforts “AI,” let’s focus on useful and helpful software.

Over a decade ago (yes, that long), I was working with a graduate student on their writing. They had difficulty describing their research to others. Their work was wonderful.

They had developed a concept and software to demonstrate the concept of how to aid people find safety in a building that was on fire or had other disasters looming. The software was going to save lives using a combination of building plans and the appointment calendars and contact information of people.

Today, we would call this “agentic AI” or some other made-up term that would sell in our AI-infatuated world. Gosh. How about calling it useful and helpful software? How about just calling it something that is useful and helpful and drop all technology terms?

Let’s build things that help persons, whose bodies have failed them but their minds still function to use machines and, interact with the rest of us. Let’s help persons survive disasters. Let’s help persons do many other useful things so that the true character and value of those persons shines through to the rest of us.

Pollyanna? Perhaps, but let’s do better.