Project Management is critical for Useless projects

This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture....

July 17, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Designing a new Infrastructure is like buying a new car

Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are. You start the investigation with some preconceived “gut-level” notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 with “Zoom Zoom” Everybody has a story about why your choice is bad code: “In my last job I used a python-C++ wrapper from vcron” car : My cousin"s friends brother had a mazda and the engine fell out on 95...

June 17, 2009 · 3 min · Aaron Held

HOA - Case study of failed political systems

I love to rant over how bad HOAs are. There are so many case studies in my life where otherwise happy friendly people become tyrants when given a bit of power. From the band leader that threatened my wedding would be a failure to the people that run the Home Owners Associations. It takes a certain type of fellow to run an HOA. My buck’s county HOA is much better then the one in Manalanapan....

June 15, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Google's iterative design for search

The google blog recently put up a remarkably content-free post on their product blog about how they use iterative design and usability studies to develop enhancements to their core search offering. Official Google Blog: Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel. We do similar testing for our search product (http://search.comcast.net) and we actually run 8-12 live tests at any given time. The real users using the product in the wild give us fantastic insight that is combined with the more traditional studies in order to guide us....

May 22, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Insta-Tag Cloud

Cute tag-cloud generator off my feed [](http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/875557/Aaron%27s_Blog ““Wordle: Aaron’s Blog”)

May 22, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held