Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips “Just as soon as I build my writer’s cottage, I will write and write and write,” said no one who was actually writing and writing and writing. I am going to write and write and write. But first, I need to: I put the last bullet in the list just for fun. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Borrowing from The Software Crisis of the 1990s, I declare The AI Crisis. A recent report from MIT claims that 95% of AI projects attempted by well-meaning folks fail. Gosh. That is a pretty high percentage. I remember the software crisis of the late 1980s and all through the 1990s. Reports like […]

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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 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Thoughts on writing and publishing a non-fiction book. This book strongly recommends having a plan for the business and a plan for the book’s content. I recently finished “Hungry Authors” by Liz Morrow and Ariel Curry, Rowan and Littlefield, 2024. I like the book. It focuses on knowing why you are writing […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is only healthcare and security in old age. Not very important, huh? In the recent past, I joined Medicare (yes, I am that old). Let’s see, just go to a government website, fill in the blanks, and viola’. Well, being a technically savvy person, I did that, or tried that. All […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a question we should constantly ask. Try the simplest thing to be, to do, to have. Several years ago, I posed a question to participants at a conference session I was facilitating. The design problem was about storing information from a business. I wanted a design of a system that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a tried and true method of gathering requirements and specifying systems. Imagine you had a thousand assistants. There are various methods of gathering requirements and specifying systems. A basic one is to imagine a thousands assistants awaiting your request. If you had a thousand assistants, what would you have them […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s stop hyperventilating about this and that AI thing. The marketplace will decide and with more wisdom than myself. I just read yet another article about yet another artificial super-duper large language model. How can a model of something be larger than the something? Isn’t a model a smaller representation of something? […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes it is worth the effort to make the output “look good.” Sometimes this pretty printing is a waste and only aggravates those involved. This past week at work I spent hours and hours pretty printing. We had “done the work” and were trying to make a printout of the work for […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When building systems, reduce the amount of intricate typing required by users. Sometimes we forget this and require too much hand jamming. I ran across the phrase “hand jamming” recently at work. I hadn’t heard that in years. I was happy to hear that some people still knew it and knew what […]

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