It’s been said that data is the new oil, and for good reason; insights from analysing data can save money and create competitive advantage, especially as we combine data sets and start data mining. But individuals don’t necessarily want to be data mined, and laws like GDPR, GLBA, PIPEDA, FERPA, etc are limiting what we can do without that individual’s consent. GDPR in particular has no grandfathering of data collected previously, meaning that if you want to hold onto the data you have, you need to anonymise it.

Read More

The difficulty with quality is that like all knowledge work, it’s invisible. Each practice within the discipline guards against specific issues, and each can be skipped... until something breaks. Software testers devote an entire career to this topic, so it is difficult to cover it all with any kind of brevity, but here are the things I would look for.

Read More

If you are starting a new project, what should you build? Perhaps a more important question is, how should you build it?

Read More

5am on the road, and the streets are empty - you get from point A to point B rapidly, as does everyone else awake at that hour. Several hours later there are many more cars on the road; everyone gets where they are going much slower. It’s not that there isn’t enough room in the lanes for the cars, it’s that every has to start and stop, reacting to the car in front of them, not just the lights. These interruptions, in essence, are the problem with high levels of concurrent work.

Read More

DevOps is a pretty popular term right now. It's well established in many companies and even made it into frameworks like SAFe 4.5. But what actually is it? Most people are aware that it involves automation, but deeper understanding seems to be rare.

Read More

I've used Kali Linux as a daily driver on my Dell XPS 15 for most of the last year, and it works well for that purpose. There are a couple of things you need to do when setting it up to get it to run smoothly though.

Read More