Category Archives: Business

How To Interview

Posted on October 18, 2011 by

One of the things I do at my present job is interview candidates for my team, and occasionally other teams too. I estimate I’ve seen ~150 people over the last 5 years. Of those very few that I do say … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle, Python | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Two Analogies and An Observation

Posted on October 13, 2011 by

In the Army, there are basically two kinds of soldiers: enlisted and commissioned. Enlisted soldiers fire weapons, drive vehicles, guard checkpoints and go on patrol and so forth – they are the “hands-on” bit of the Army. You would start … Continue reading →

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Scrum

Posted on September 28, 2011 by

Perhaps fittingly during the Rugby World Cup I am now a Certified ScrumMaster. As much as you can be a master of anything after a 2-day course ;-) While I fully agree with the overall Agile strategy of aiming for … Continue reading →

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Failing Gracefully

Posted on September 22, 2011 by

Let’s say you have a high-performance system, operating beyond it’s design capacity already, and the workload is increasing. What would you like it to do? Keep running, but slow down. This is the default behaviour for most applications, as in, … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle | Leave a comment

Learning the Wrong Lessons

Posted on September 18, 2011 by

I’m going to start with an assumption here, which I think is pretty reasonable, that when everyone learns to program, or to operate a system, they do so in an environment much simpler than one that is used for commercial-level … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Oracle, Random thoughts | 3 Comments

Is Virtualization Worth It?

Posted on July 19, 2011 by

Before planning any project, the first thing I like to do is ask what outcome are we trying to achieve here? A case in point is virtualization, the holy grail of IT du jour. A virtualized infrastructure is not a … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle | 2 Comments

Jack of all trades → Master of Disaster.

Posted on June 13, 2011 by

When I got started in the industry†, like many people I was a generalist; designing and programming GUIs, network services, systems and database administration, even a bit of Photoshop, account management (the other sort of clients!) and end-user support. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, C++, f#, Ocaml, Oracle, Random thoughts, Scala | 3 Comments

The Means of Production

Posted on May 20, 2011 by

In ’94 when I went to college, the Mech Eng department had recently taken delivery of a shipment of DEC Alpha workstations. These were brutally powerful machines; 64M main memory, 3D graphics cards, running OpenVMS, and 6 or maybe 8 … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Random thoughts | Leave a comment

Hype

Posted on March 31, 2011 by

No-one is saying anything about clouds now that people didn’t also say about mainframes 30 or even 40 years ago.

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Still here…

Posted on November 25, 2010 by

Sorry I’ve not updated much recently, new team and new project, working with Oracle RTD. Very cool stuff, interesting technology that’s directly visible to the business, unlike the hardcore DBA and systems work I’m more used to, that if you’re … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Ocaml, Oracle | Leave a comment