Latest Posts - Page 49 of 194

July 12, 2022July 3, 2022 Grow From Failures

Know Who You Work For – Lines Are Not Always Clear

Clarity and communication are common themes in our improvement episodes. Those are most important when you need to know who you work for. Which master do you serve? The mistake highlighted this time is among many in a situation gone wrong. It also shows how some oversights or missteps can open the door to significant consequences. It does not hurt to be cautious in the modern business world. Things can change quickly. Important Clarification – Know Who You Work For There are competing goals and objectives even within companies. When you add on top of that all of the politics and maneuvering that exists in many environments, things can get complicated. Even more important, your boss is not always the... Read more

July 7, 2022June 25, 2022 Grow From Failures

Admitting Defeat – Moving Forward And Accepting The Loss

In a season about growing from errors and mistakes, it seems that an episode about admitting defeat is required. We cannot stay stationary and make progress. This concept holds for individual situations and group decisions like the one we examine. That is why some things in life clearly defined as a win or loss (a sports match, for example) are a blessing. We have no real choice other than to move forward. Yes, we can languish in the loss and try to reverse it. However, it is an exercise in futility that forces us sooner or later to accept reality. Admitting Defeat Is Necessary One of the key ingredients to learning from a mistake is recognizing it as such. That... Read more

July 6, 2022July 2, 2022 Become a Better Developer

What Goes Into Building Software

Welcome to another edition of Developreneur. In this presentation, we are gonna be talking about software development. What goes into building software. Instead of this being just a run-of-the-mill discussion on SDLC, we will flip it on its head and take a different approach to software development. Previously, we have talked about things like software development SDLC, we’ve talked about software test life cycle, and we’ve given you the benchmark or textbook descriptions on these particular topics. Now let us talk about building software from an application perspective, building a new application from scratch. What Goes Into Building Software…, It all begins with an idea. Our journey will take us through software development or software development as a whole, from... Read more

July 5, 2022June 25, 2022 Grow From Failures

Clearly Defined Objectives – It Is A Mistake To Not Ask Questions

This episode of learning from mistakes focuses on clearly defined objectives. The error highlights what can go wrong when we fail to have them. We also see these same potential issues pop up when we have weakly defined requirements. Finally, there is a need to communicate all of this as well. When we don’t know what we don’t know, many things other than hilarity ensue. Clearly Defined Objectives Are Needed Through Our Daily Life There are many ways to fall for this lack of clarity. One of the most common ones is to fall back on labels and similar mechanisms. There are many opportunities in life to communicate an idea through a generalization and send the wrong message. Some of... Read more

June 30, 2022June 21, 2022 Grow From Failures

Testing Your Backups – Disaster Recovery Requires Verification

There are a few times I have been taught the value of testing your backups. That is why even disaster recovery needs to be validated. The first story I share is probably a worst-case scenario. However, it can happen, so we need to be aware of failure points. We must validate our backups regularly to ensure the process we are counting on is there when we need it. Testing Your Backups Before They Are Needed There are many ways to test backups and our disaster recovery plan. We can do the extreme version, cut power to the required systems, and attempt to replace them via the procedure. However, that may not be needed. We may be able to do partial... Read more

June 28, 2022June 21, 2022 Grow From Failures

Sweeping Consequences – Avoid All In Until You Are Sure

There is an old joke about sweeping consequences in IT related to wildcard commands like “rm -rf *.” However, there are ways to avoid getting bit by them. For example, we can do test runs and subset queries before doing the real thing. While it is undoubtedly faster to rip off one of those commands, it is also dangerous. This episode looks into some tricks of the trade I learned after countless times of being tripped up by this concept. Sometimes Easy Creates Sweeping Consequences A database is the best tool for examples of doing something quick and dirty that ends up costly. We can see this even with resource usage before more significant effects like data loss or corruption.... Read more