Harry's Ruminations

We once were a nation that tolerated "intolerable" people, that balanced inhumanity with contrition and restoration of the contrite. All fall short. We abided Daniel Webster AND John C. Calhoun, Billy Graham and Larry Flynt, MLK and George Wallace, the Black Panthers and the KKK.   Did we particularly WANT TO?     Of course not. Why, then? Because tolerance of ideas is the price of freedom. I see that freedom ending soon. Emotion is truth. Outrage becomes mandate. Thoughts must not become a crime. At the height of the Terror, a woman came to the journalist Marat in 1793 and enumerated a list of people that were secretly against the Jacobin regime. "Soon I shall have them all guillotined in Paris," he replied confidently. Marat's pen had the power to stoke outrage that led to the scaffold. Is today's "Cancel Culture" any different? https://newrepublic.com/article/155141/cancel-cultur...

Hackathon (n) 1. a design sprint -like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development , including graphic designers , interface designers , project managers , and others, often including domain experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the goal of creating a functioning product by the end of the event. I posit Hackathons are Crap.   They are useless distractions from Actual Work® that have none of the intended outcomes for anyone involved. The goal of most hackathons are these: Provide a break from regular work for "creatives" like programmers and graphic designers. Break the top-down product cycle and let said creatives make something that seems relevant to them. Provide useful ideas as fodder for the next strategic planning cycle. Provide useful features for customers. Let me take each in turn. It is NOT a Break This is my major beef. "H...

There's no such thing as bad publicity -- P.T. Barnum So here we are.  As I type this, the House of Representatives seems ready to cave-in to impeachment proceedings . Allegedly, the President negotiated with a foreign power to obtain dirt on a possible opponent in the 2020 election.  To leverage that dirt, he withheld US foreign aid.  So the story goes. I really dislike our President.  Thankfully, in America, one can do that and not go to jail.  I resent how he personally took over my political party like a virus, how he made America less than it is for his own gain. Looking forward, if this impeachment goes forward it will have the following effects: He will not be removed from office.  The Senate will NEVER vote him out.  They've made that abundantly clear It feeds his narrative to his (minority) base that's "The Deep State" is against him because he won't play "their" game. It will lead to another 4 years of Donald Trump.  The center...

I posted this to Facebook in October 2017 after the Las Vegas shooting.  It remains valid after a weekend of carnage, and no end in sight.  FWIW, I am for constitutional gun ownership.   I am not for the capability of killing 30-50 people (not feral hogs) in under a minute.  After today, I'm struggling to see the use in an AR-15 with a binary trigger and a 100 round drum magazine. I've been next to a guy with a setup like that at the range. While not strictly speaking an automatic weapon, the purpose is clear: Sling as much lead as fast as possible downrange. Look, I'm a proud and safe gun owner. I support the right to bear arms, per our Constitution. But, if an event like today never happened again, I'd happily support outlawing semiautomatic weapons of any kind. In all candor, any legitimate use you have for a firearm works fine with a bolt action rifle, pump shotgun, or revolver. Can you really not keep someone out of your house wi...

Disclaimer: There's probably a term for this, but I've this pattern in teams and I'd like to discuss it. Scenario You have a high functioning team of 6-10 individuals.  Team culture is great.  Everyone is pulling in the same direction, and lots is getting done.  Yet, in under 4 months half the team will be gone and the rest will be considering it.  As a manager, you'll realize you can't deliver anything and it all seemed to crumble overnight.  What happened? Team Cascade failure happened Definition I'm applying Cascading Failure from engineering to teams because I propose the same causes apply. Taking the definition from Wikipedia the failure of one or few parts can trigger the failure of other parts and so on Teams get paid to produce.  At my current employer, they're paid to both produce and operate the things they produce.  As time goes on, a given team will produce up to its natural carrying capacity , when the cognitive and schedul...

Traffic in Austin seems almost reasonable during Summer. I live in Georgetown, Texas, and I work in The Domain, just off MoPac @ Burnett Rd.  For the uninitiated, that means I have a commute of about 25 miles down one of the worst highways in America .  It costs me about $2.50 in tolls to roundtrip to work, but often the toll section of MoPac is a parking lot between 8 and 10 am, and 5-7 pm.  A full work-month means I'm putting about $70 depreciation, $100 in gas, and $50 in tolls out of my pocket.  Call it $220 all-up. During the summer, this looks like me leaving the house around 8 and getting to work around 8:45 to 9.  Sixty minutes to go twenty-five miles. Believe it or not, that's a GOOD day.  Once the school year starts, the hour can easily be 90 minutes, meaning I'm on the road for 3 hours every day.  What to do? The most obvious thing is work-from-home regularly.  Nothing about my job requires my physical presence on Alterra Park...

I'm a 40 year old working software engineer. I'm not a program manager, project manager, team lead, architect, business analyst, sytems analyst, or whatever other term means "Doesn't code anymore." I make my living by telling machines what to do so the company I work for can make money (alot of it) and pay me money (a little of it, but an obscene amount still). As I sit here, I'm 2 days away from ending a three year stint with one team, and picking up with another within the same company.  The reasons aren't complicated, but it's impolitic to go into them.  Suffice it to say, I've been looking around for about 6 months internally and it took about a month to get through the transition.  Monday is 'Go' day. So I ponder: How many more of these do I have in me? If I think really hard--then give up and look at my CV--I have had these jobs professionally: IT support (scripting, custom apps) for a group of 200 mechanical engineers Pr...