Does my marriage need more FHIR? I read this as being solicited to spice up my marriage. Wildly inappropriate for LinkedIn 😂. (FHIR is pronounced “fire”) Originally I added my ‘Marriage to Jen’ in my LinkedIn work history as a private joke. Almost immediately it was effective in filtering sales and recruiting calls to let me know they had actually read my profile. I’m keeping it because now it’s helping me find the bots. ...
My 89 year old Dad got beat by a younger team of 70 year olds. Dad called me today. His team, Ponza United got bested by Denver at the Florida classic. He said Denver had lots of people on the young side and “They could run” Genetics definitely play a role in his continued ability to compete (Thanks again Mom for my celiac and asthma!) but he was a lifelong advocate of never missing a game. From the time I was young he trained multiple times a week and I even remember an argument when my sister wanted to get married on game day. His priority was to maintain a lifelong habit of training, and I watched that habit become stronger through the decades. ...
The legendary W. Edwards Deming once said “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Playing Batman: Arkham Shadow recently, this quote kept resonating as I watched Commissioner Gordon - a dedicated public servant - struggle against Gotham’s broken system. This made me reflect on what effective executive sponsorship really looks like. Early in my career at Comcast, I experienced transformative sponsorship. Our development team needed Macs for coding (this was pre-WSL - yes, I’m dating myself here). Corporate policy prohibited Macs on the network. Instead of telling us to “make do,” or intentionally violating corporate IT policy, our executive sponsor recognized the systemic barrier and took action. They funded and built a parallel network infrastructure that enabled our success. Our team went on to deliver exceptional results because we were properly empowered. ...
This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from. I realized that many of the examples were trivial and did not demonstrate the reality of what hypermedia brings to the table. ...
It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime. As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud. As a Manager with a sometimes disproportional ego I also felt an obligation to ‘disappear’ for some time in order to give @tomjbarker room to make the team his own. I’ve no doubt that he will take what we started to the next level. ...