Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Interesting

June 4th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This is interesting to me. Is it interesting to you? interesting, adjective, something that attracts your attention, arouses your curiosity, or holds your interest because it is unusual, exciting, or engaging. It is highly subjective, meaning what is fascinating to one person may be dull to another.—Google search The answer to my […]

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Tags: Alternatives · Communication · Concepts · Expectations · Ideas

Words from the Dictionary

May 18th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips It seems we haven’t learned much as we still read stuff that makes no sense. A long time ago, I heard a political commentator read part of a political party’s platform. Parties used to do these platforms to inform everyone of what they were saying. The commentator would read a sentence and […]

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Tags: Communication · Meaning · Mistakes · Reading · Vocabulary · Word · Writing

Making Verbs out of Nouns

May 14th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Let’s turn these nouns into verbs. Let’s not. We are going to modernize the application to optimize it and maximize our efforts. — Wrote someone who shouldn’t have been writing In other words, we want maximum free time. Let’s make the application modern and optimal. Turning a noun into a verb (I […]

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Tags: Brevity · Clarity · Communication · Simple · Word · Writing

The First Version (Sometimes Is the Best)

April 30th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips As much as we “have a better idea” and want to revise, sometimes the first version is the best. The first draft. The bane of writers of fiction and non-fiction. Let’s fix it. Okay. That’s the first version. Let’s revise as we become “smarter.” Are we always becoming smarter? Sometimes not. The […]

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Tags: Communication · Management · Publishing · Reframe · Review · Writing

Three Times Less (huh?)

March 19th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Another rant about writing that makes no sense (to me). This system uses three times less (memory, weight, time, space, effort, and whatever) than that system. I understand what it means to use three times more weight (15 pounds instead of 5 pounds), but what does it mean to use three times […]

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Tags: Communication · Fairy Tales · Language · Mathematics · Writing

Product Versus Function

March 12th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog. Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure. Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I […]

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Tags: Communication · Engineering · Systems · Talk · Visibility · Vocabulary

Better or Just Different?

February 12th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Let’s revise that one more time. Okay, but will it be better or just different? Revisions. Edits. That is what writers do. Many prescribe to the notion that the first draft is practically nothing. The real work of the writer begins when the revising and editing begin. And how many revisions finish […]

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Tags: Brevity · Communication · Process · Review · Writing

Geo-this and Geo-that

February 5th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I express a bit of angst over the use of “geo.” This post may mean nothing to everyone else in the world, but I have to get it out of my system. I have been overwhelmed with the use of the term geo the past ten years. Just my personal problem, but […]

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Tags: Communication · Language · Vocabulary · Word

The Pit of Endless Details

January 22nd, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Wait. Stop. Someone grab that person. That person is about to fall into the pit of endless details. Oh no. It’s too late! I know it’s about to happen. I should be able to do something to stop it. Oh no. It happened too fast. There is nothing I can do. The […]

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Tags: Communication · Concepts · Context · Conversation · Leadership · Learning

The Death of AI $$$

December 29th, 2025 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips All this $$$ is killing AI. I used to work in AI. That means that I researched things that might allow us to do things that we couldn’t do. I attempted to instruct a computer or, as we used to say, I attempted to write a computer program to do something that […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Communication · Language · Money · Technology · Word