About Time —
In software engineering, the major time-related problems are measuring time, and representing time. The first one is too hard for software engineers, and is better left to the generally smarter hardware people. The latter is a common source of confusion. In this post, I will attempt to set a guideline. Read ~1658 more words…ChatGPT vs. Google, and The Confusion Between Enabling Technologies, Product Features, and Problem Spaces —
ChatGPT is a Conversational AI which is probably the state of the art that has a public facing UI. It is backed by a Large Language Model. Some wonder whether this product, and its enabling technology might address the same problem space as Information Retrieval systems, question and answering websites, or computer programming in its entirety. I believe not; or at least not on their own. Read ~1841 more words…Web Analytics Privacy — A Matter of Trust —
Privacy on the internet is largely a matter of trust. Inherent to the way our network layer works, information which is generally considered personally identifiable, pours into the hands of whoever runs a web server. Privacy is a matter of our trust in corporations, law makers, technology, and people. Read ~2080 more words…The Anatomy of a Tiny Software Product —
Even a tiny software product with only one feature touches on 24 different technology concepts for its implementation of only 2000 lines of code. Product decisions are a big influence on this, which makes product engineering hard. People who do not get that often confuse software products with computer programs. Read ~2138 more words…Hiring is Match Making, not Selection —
When discussing hiring practices a question that you will often hear is “how do I find a React developer?”. Meanwhile, nobody has ever asked me “how do I find a mission aligned software professional who fits in our team and who happens to be capable of learning React?”. You can benefit a lot from a stronger focus on that latter question, though. Read ~1943 more words…Your B2B SaaS Integration Story —
B2B SaaS often needs integration with the customer's systems in order to do something useful. Depending on what type of SaaS product you sell this can range from straightforward identity brokerage to full blown API based data integrations. This post is about the latter. Read ~1704 more words…An Algorithm for "Visually Appealing" Image Ordering —
Sometimes you care to show a list of images using a slider or some other inherently ordered display. You can use some deep learning magic and a genetic algorithm to optimise the order of images for a more interesting user experience. Read ~2486 more words…Use Data the Hard Way —
Here are three mistakes executives (and others) deliberately make to appear data driven. Read ~1481 more words…So You Think You Can Compute In the Cloud —
The essential goal of cloud computing is to allow every individual computer programmer in your organisation to independently write, build, and deploy a software service in a single day regardless of whether that service will serve 10, 10 thousand, or 10 million users. Your mission is to achieve this using the least amount of cloud computing products. There are two kinds of people working in cloud computing: the kind who do not understand this and the kind who have an incentive to not tell you this. Read ~1355 more words…The Official friso.lol Guide to Hiring —
Somewhere between fundamental skills and passion for challenging work lies the neatly organised space of buzzword compliance that recruitment professionals know and love. This is how the lower ranking squads in the mythical war for talent fight for what remains on the supply side of a inherently opaque market. Don't be like them. Read ~3342 more words…The Difference Between Startups and Established Businesses in Two Sentences —
Established businesses are run at sustainable pace, while startup are run at sustainable determination. Established businesses succeed with carefully planned stragey execution, while startups succeed with frantically executing a strategy of disruption. The end. Read ~935 more words…Fighting Information Asymmetry - Or How To Buy a Used Car —
When you are not capable of physically doing something at satisfactory proficiency, you can hire someone to do it for you. When you are not capable of deciding something based on your current knowledge, you can rely on expert advice to drive the decision for you. The former is mostly a good idea, while the latter can be extremely dangerous. This is true because in the former case you pay someone to compensate for a skills gap: you still know and understand the intended outcome. In the latter case, you pay someone to level an information asymmetry, meaning you inherently have no way of veryfying whether you are actually receiving help. An extreme case of this reality occurs when you allow a sales person to be your trusted advisor. A very extreme case occurs when you allow a used car sales person as your trusted advisor. We can mitigate this. Read ~2190 more words…Evolution of a Value Proposition —
Most businesses that do not trade physical goods are professional services businesses. This is true because the world needs more plumbers than piping manufacturers, more custom business software than operating systems, and ostensibly more Agile coaches than Atlassian suites (or sticky note manufacturers). Plumbers, custom software builders, and Agile coaches share a simple business model: do work that someone else either can't (economically) do or doesn't want to do. Unfortunately, "we do what you can't" — notwithstanding its refreshing transparency — turns out not to be a winning formulation of your value proposition. Read ~4193 more words…Engineering Notes. Do You Have Them? —
The single most useful thing in terms of effort versus reward that I ever did for a engineering hiring process is writing a 10 page document that just tells people how things are done at our shop. You can do this too! Read ~1028 more words…Overcoming the B2B Curse —
A key challenge in commercial B2B software is that you are selling a product to a person who is not going to use it. As it turns out just listing the benefits of the purchase is not a viable approach to winning sales. Read ~3642 more words…