How To Manage A Tech Career

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a strange disconnect with several friends when discussing their careers. It’s almost like there’s a fundamental difference in our world view — our assumptions about how the universe works. I was confused, until I started to suspect that I may be…

Conversational Architecture

My business partner Roy and I wandered around this lovely party on the Gawker rooftop here in NYC last summer. A “Hacks and Hackers” meetup, it presented a common ground for programmers and journalists to get together and compare notes. We started to notice an interesting gap in…

A Conversational Architecture Approach

Once upon a time there was personalization. Of course no one called it that. It was just that when you walked into the general store in your one-horse town, the guy behind the counter already knew who you were. ”Hi <your-name>, how are you doing? How are those…

Modeling Risk

Why do some software / web projects run off the rails so badly? Are we just incompetent? Is it that the very practice of programming is so incredibly difficult that it defies any attempt to manage it? Perhaps software development is just an inherently terrible idea, and we should leave it up to…

Ecosystems and Organizations

In the past I’ve been in several organizations (businesses, in my case) where management has a sense that…

Modeling Risk (Part 3): Quality

The plot so far: there are specific things that cause project’s to fail, beyond the abilities of seemingly competent people to control. These forces aren’t random, they are specific patterns and antipatterns that create accumulating risk that bears down on projects like…

Optimization and the Standard Deal

Somewhere in the middle of college I started to get the feeling I was being ripped off.

Content’s Winter of Discontent Part One

Contextual Business
Oct. 21 2013

The content-creating class has sure created a lot of content lamenting the downfall of their industries in the last decade. It resembles a very public and communal march…

Modeling Risk (Part 2)

In part one we had a look at risk that comes to the project from the client, before it even starts. This time we’ll look at risk that comes from the composition of the project and the project team.