1+ week, 1+ day ago   (1665+ words) Over the years, working with enterprise data, analytics, reporting, and production systems has made me increasingly cautious about one particular statement: “The system worked exactly as designed.” Sometimes, that is reassuring. Other times, it is the beginning of a much…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1192+ words) There is a version of network engineering where you get a maintenance window. Somebody sends a calendar invite, everyone agrees that Sunday 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. belongs to you, and if you overrun by twenty minutes the worst thing that happens is an…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (899+ words) I’ve spent enough time around Major Incident bridges to know that the first few minutes rarely look as clean as the process diagrams. A critical service is unavailable. People start joining the call. Technical teams are checking logs, recent changes,…...

2+ week, 4+ hour ago   (1513+ words) One of the most frustrating networking problems is a failure that disappears when you try to investigate it. I ran into this on a high-speed Ethernet platform that looked completely healthy in the lab. The link came up normally, traffic…...

3+ week, 9+ hour ago   (1662+ words) More than 4 billion people globally live without a precise address. Two founders with no technical background set out to change that and ended up rethinking not just their product, but what it means to build a startup in the age…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (1237+ words) In 2014, financial intelligence units across the European Union received almost a million suspicious transaction reports. Around ten per cent of them were investigated further. Roughly one per cent of criminal proceeds were confiscated. Europol, publishing those figures in 2017, noted that…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (453+ words) What follows is part 3 of my ongoing observations and ideas inspired by “Project Hail Mary”. You can find part 1 and part 2 linked here. Once again, I will warn those wary of spoilers to maybe stop reading, NOT click those links,…...

4+ week, 2+ day ago   (806+ words) Years ago, I came across an infographic called Businesses Have Messy Data. It visualized something every growing company eventually discovers: data becomes chaos. Looking at that infographic made me think about emails. Not email as a communication tool. Email as…...