I’ve had a lot of luck in my career, especially as it pertains to my work environment. Although I can’t say every technical job I’ve had was all unicorns and bacon, I’ve been very fortunate to have been treated fairly and professionally through most of my employment history. Not only was I treated respectfully, but the last three employers I…
Three years ago, I left the ranks of full-time employment to become an independent consultant. At the same time, I partnered with Linchpin People, a guild of independent consultants made up of some of the very best practitioners in the database and business intelligence space. Working with Linchpin helped to ease my transition into independent consulting, and my ongoing relationship…
A few weeks ago I met a couple of my business partners in a moderately upscale restaurant in the Washington, DC area. It was not my typical kind of place – I’m more of a casual dining guy – but I did enjoy the experience and the atmosphere. There wasn’t any one particular thing that made the experience a positive…
Humans are creatures of habit, and I suspect that engineering/technical types are even more so. We find something that works and tend to stick with it, sometimes neglecting to occasionally experiment with new tools or methods. The mantra of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” becomes the defense for standing by what we know works just fine. There is…
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I read a book entitled The Phoenix Project. This book has been in my Kindle library for some time, but only this weekend did I make time to read it – and I’m glad I did. The story centers around a guy who is more or less forced out of his comfort zone and into a…
What is permissible is not always honorable. – Marcus Tullius Cicero Rules. Best practices. Guidelines. Design patterns. Policies. All are good and necessary, and you’ll rarely find anyone who will argue against the need to establish boundaries and set expectations. But can adherence to rules and design patterns be taken too far? I believe it can. The Rules Gone Amok:…
The key to successful analysis is to ask enough good questions. How do you know that you’ve asked enough questions? When you think you have all the information you need to get started, ask 10 more good questions. Those ten questions will lead to five more, which will lead to 3 more, and so on. After you get started, if…
I’m a fixer. A tinkerer. As a kid, I would take my toys apart just to see how they worked, and to prove that I could put them back together again (and these experiments often had mixed results). Even today, I’m still kind of a shade tree handyman. In fact, earlier this week I had to fix a broken safety…
“He’s a screw-up. Always trying things that don’t work.” I’ll be honest: I used to be afraid of being the person described above. I didn’t want to be known as someone whose ideas didn’t work. And to that end, I was successful: most of what I tried was successful. The bad news was that I wasn’t doing much. I was…
Yesterday I read an article entitled “Why I Don’t Want to Have Coffee With You”, in which the author writes that he doesn’t have the time or the desire to simply “have coffee”. While I empathize with some of the author’s justifications for his position, I was disappointed at the hard line he took on this. Personally, I prefer a…