Facilitate the flow of information to the point of its highest value. The media industry at large has lost its path. Most media companies are heavily tilted toward media as entertainment, rather than media as information. As a result, they are engaged in a digital race to the bottom, where falling ad CPM drives them…
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
As I write this, I sit in an apartment in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, just a few blocks from where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached to his congregation. I cannot express in words the gratitude I feel toward Dr. King and all the thousands of people who marched with him to demand…
Component Contracts in Service Oriented Systems
PRINCIPLE: Relationships must be governed by contracts that are monitored for performance. In order to build a reliable system that is composed of many services, we need to have some guidelines for making the services reliable, both in the technical sense, and in the more psychological sense of people having confidence that things will work.…
Toward a Reusable Content Repository
There are a plethora of web-based content management systems and website publishing systems in the world. Almost all of them are what you might call “full stack solutions,” meaning that they try to cover everything you need to cook up a full publishing system, from content editing to theming. Wordpress is the most obvious example,…
CASTED: Cooperative Agents, Single Threaded, Event Driven
The past looked like this: A User logs into a Computer, launches a Program, and interacts with it. The future looks like this: The Computer on your desk runs a Program (in the background) that collaborates with a Program running on the Computer in your pocket and another Program running on a Computer in the…
Evolving Systems vs Design Consultants – A Recurring Pattern
I often think of systems architecture as analogous to this word game I played as a child. I don’t know if the game has a name, but it is begun by selecting two words, say “cat” and “dog”. The goal is to begin with one word, and end with the other. The rules are, you…
Take heed, managers: your “best practices” are killing your company
If you are a manager, you need to understand the ideas of W. Edwards Deming. Deming wrote several books about management, in which he chastised American business schools and American corporate management for perpetuating a failed philosophy and failed management techniques. Deming proposed a new philosophy of management motivated by quality and grounded in systems…
Systems vs Habits: Why GTD Often Fails
In my previous post, I wrote about David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and productivity system. If GTD has a weakness, it is that, although the book describes the system very well, it does a poor job of describing the change of daily habits you’ll have to perform if you really want to implement the system. The major…
Getting Things Done — Productivity System
David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is a phenomenon in the tech community. If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably already read the book, or at least know something about the productivity system that it defines. I read it years ago, but like many readers never put into practice more than…
How to set up a new PC in 12 Steps, or How I spent my evening renewing my disgust with Windows
Step 1: Spend 30 minutes unpacking boxes, peeling plastic, and connecting cables. Step 2: In breathless anticipation, press the power button. Step 3: Spend another 30 minutes hunting for the Windows Product Key so you can access the computer you just bought. Find it, finally, on an indelible sticker on the far side of the…
