Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips There is an old diagram that helps explain what a system does. Sometimes, these old diagrams are lost and need to be found again. Apologies to Google and the Chromecast, but it is a good example to mention. Me, i.e., old engineer: What is that? Young Engineer: It is a Google Chromecast. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A good test provides information—no more and no less. Let’s take a step back to the fundamentals of engineering and building things. Part of building some thing is to perform some tests on the thing. Why perform a test? The oft-cited answer is, “to show that the thing works.” Deep sigh. We […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes smartphones and the like only come in one color. There is more to adding colors than meets the eye. I used to work for an organization that built little gadgets. Every little gadget came in the same color: black. One year I worked on a project where I thought I was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the best thing to do is put your seat in a chair, your hands on the keyboard, and type in all the data manually instead of writing software to do it. I experienced it at least half-a-dozen times in my 28 years in government: We need to track our inventory. Due […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Should we send our customers to a veterinarian, i.e., someone who is accustomed to working with beings that cannot speak? First, a story: My granddad was a stubborn man. My granddad was ill and went to a doctor, an MD. My granddad was paying the MD a lot of money, so he […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In government, we loved the org chart. We loved it so much that we often forgot that the org chart was not the people. The org chart is a representation of how we organize persons. The org chart is just a picture, not the reality. Often, in soft matters, we confuse the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Before putting your work on a computer, do it by pencil and paper for a year. I developed this guideline about 20 years ago. I kept seeing people spending lots of money (million$) creating databases and such to help them do their work.  Most of the work was simple, like: We have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Configuration Management is concerned with the integrity of the product. It isn’t complicated. It may not, however, be liked by all. I had a conversation with a co-worker recently about configuration management (CM). We had sat through a series of meetings where CM was tossed about in a swirl of angst and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If it has software, it can be hacked, i.e., it is not secure. Sorry to write that, but I can’t find any way around it. What a wonderful world. We have computers everywhere. Those computers all run software, which is nothing more than instructions written by persons. And all those persons have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If a system fails at one boundary, it will probably fail at another boundary. Hence, if you find a boundary failure, start looking for other boundary failures while you still have a chance at prevention instead of correction. A few years back I had a problem with my van. I couldn’t reliably […]

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