Posts

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. ...

Over a month ago, my journey with gopuff came to an end. It took me longer than expected to process all the emotions and think about what to do next. I poured myself into building our industry-defining, vertically integrated, quick commerce business. The first few years were the most productive of my professional career, and I enjoyed every minute. I didn’t feel the need to write a farewell post. It was, however, an excellent set of lessons for my children. The top ones were ‘don’t count your chickens (I believed I could retire on the equity)’ and don’t sacrifice your quality of life for a business. No matter how much they tell you they respect and need you, it’s not the same sentiment as I get from the kids when college tuition payments roll around 😃. ...

Devops is many different things to many different people, but nearly all practitioners agree that infrastructure as code is a critical part. So rather then use the Azure portal UI to create our desired resources we are going to script it in code. We will have confidence that we can create, destroy and eventually scale resources as needed. In this post we will create a Azure static using terraform, step by step. ...

My father was featured on Hoda’s Bucket list segment on the Today show. My dad never really wanted to talk about his past in public, but recently he met one of the soldiers from the US 30th Infantry who rescued him. With the passing of the last of the group who rescued him, he know wants to ensure his story is told. The today show segment didn’t go into detail of his rescue, but men like Matthew Rozell and Frank Towers have documented it on Teaching History Matters ...

Introduction Chat based interfaces, backed by powerful AI (Artificial Intelligence), are effective ways to connect with your customers. For decades thousands of brilliant and dedicated scientists have collaborated to create AI and Language Processing to construct automated systems for the betterment of humanity. More recently Microsoft wrapped this magic in tooling that makes it accessible to the less sophisticated masses (and .net developers) When blogging became popular a number of companies sought to ‘commoditize’ the complexity of setting up a server and running custom website software. Wordpress is the undisputed winner of ‘personal blog software’. What Wordpress has done for websites and content management Microsoft is doing for AI. The haven’t won yet, Amazon, IBM and others are all in this together. I’m working on an Amazon bot in parallel to this so that I can compare and contrast the services. ...