Professional

I was reviewing an older repository during a production incident the other day and couldn’t figure out what sections of the code were doing or what the overall system looked like. It’s so frustrating to be in undocumented code. Software documentation is a mature pillar of engineering these days. The tools are there, the patterns exist, the documentation standards are well-established. We just… don’t do it. Why don’t we when there is documented correlation between high performing engineering teams and open and accessible codebases? ...

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. ...