There was a customer engineer named Tom that I knew that was remarkable in two ways. First, he was always coming up with the most odd-ball consumer product ideas that he was convinced would be the next big thing. Second, his job was to reach out to customers and gather their requirements for the engineers. Problem was that he was not very good with customers.

Being in a big, slow-moving company, his poor job fit was often overlooked. That is until the “Bob’s” arrived to clean things up. As Bob grilled Tom on what he did exactly, Tom got flustered…

One of my favorite songs growing up was a tune by David Bowie. It was from his 1971 album Hunky Dory and the chorus remains one of his most memorable, particularly the last two lines:

“Time may change me. But you can’t trace time.”

We cannot slow or stall the effect time has on our surroundings, relationships, and ourselves. It marches on, changing everything we know and touch. Therefore trying to claw back the past is a hopeless exercise. As Bowie says, you can’t trace time.

A few days ago, the past came back to haunt the present for one…

Love them or hate them, we can make comments useful

There is a game I used to play growing up called Clue. The premise was simple. You went around a board to different rooms to deduce who murdered the game’s victim, where the crime took place, and which weapon was used.

Other than Risk, it was my favorite game as a child. While you could get lucky and just guess the combination early on, the real fun was whittling down the mystery through the clues you gathered. …

Some personal musings from year under the pandemic

This is a bit of a departure from my usual post. Every time I write, there is a personal lens of my experiences, conversations, and discoveries that I bring to these essays. But it’s my birthday and there are some things not in the usual vein of tech trends, engineering principles, developer culture, coding, and organizational efficiency that I hope you will indulge me in sharing.

I have to state that this year was not hard for me in the way it was for many others. I was very fortune and blessed…

I was never a great student growing up. The phrase used by teachers was, “Smart, but doesn’t apply himself.” It was a chain around my neck that dragged me down for years. Many people enjoyed school, but I was not one of them.

The problem was notability, but time. I was always busy with other things. For example, in college, instead of working on boring engineering problem sets in the computer lab, I could try to takeover other people’s terminal sessions. When I lived in the Engineering House, I was running a high-stakes poker game (for college that is) and…

You can’t always please everyone. I am reminded of that on a regular basis when it comes to this newsletter. While I generally write about topics in software engineering and leadership, I try to introduce other ideas that are important to me such as diversity & inclusion, community building, and food photos from around the globe. This makes some people upset.

One very recent incident involved an event I recently hosted. It was a talk on Clubhouse, the audio-only social network that is taking the world by storm. Apparently this offended diehard Android users among my readership, even though I…

What was your first portable music player? The answer to this question will definitely age you. For me it was a personal cassette player, but not the cool one from Sony. After a brief time with clunky portable CD players, I quickly jumped onto MP3 players.

It was early days and design aesthetics did not seem so important. It was all about the features, and the one I had from iRiver was the Swiss Army knife of players. It played MP3 files, but it did so much more. …

I long for the days of real programmers. Not the sorry excuses for programmers we have nowadays that need things like IDE’s, GUI’s, and API’s, but programmers that knew how to code like true geeks wrangling 1’s and 0’s or living in vi and Emacs. They certainly did not write in so-called interpreted languages like JavaScript, Ruby, or Python. No way! Real programmers compile code that they write in real languages like C++, Java, and Haskell.

These avocado toast eating, cold brew coffee drinking wannabe hackers are nothing but a bunch of script kiddies with standing desks and natural light…