We wouldn’t be able to operate without this essential knowledge…
- The difference between MBps and Mbps
- How to not sound pedantic when correcting someone’s use of B or b
- How a landline telephone works with just two wires and no protocol stack
- Where not to eat in Nice
- You don’t put your phone on the table when in town for MWC
- The great stuff you can do with your data if it’s relational
- The great stuff you can do with your data if it’s columnar
- IP is deeply flawed
- When to host locally
- When to host in the cloud
- One good bitmap editor
- VLOOKUP
- The sales team can only open PPT files
- The Erlang
- Dijkstra routing
- An STM-16 frame used to sound *really big*
- STS-48 and STM-16 are basically the same, depending where you come from
- The difference between a serial port, a VGA port, and a 1980s joystick port
- Your users want the solution to look good on their CV, or help them go home on time, or both
- How to explain it takes another six months of R&D, even though you just showed them the PoC working
- The OSS software industry started as a way to replace TIRKS. It failed
- Why your developers don’t want to use Oracle anymore
- What Oracle got right
- The measurable RoI benefit of new OSS is to business, not operations
- The biggest impact new BSS has on your IT is in operations
- The cost of free software
- The value of a commercial license
- You can have more compute resources on your desk today than British Telecom had to run their OSS twenty years ago
- The theoretical optimal solution rarely works IRL
- Undoing a change on the network is 1000x harder than undoing a design in a database
- Microsoft Office is probably the #1 OSS platform
- Why you can’t ‘just do it in Excel?’
- Enough about VBA to know why it’s evil for anything other than a bit of document formatting
- Never attend a meeting on an empty stomach
- Never hoard technical expertise
- Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas
- Automated systems working with poor data…. don’t work
- But poor data is not an excuse for a failed project
- If available data is poor, your highest value project is making something out of it
- Parallelising tasks
- Whether you process is compute, I/O, or memory bound
- When to use synchronous or asynchronous interfaces
- The pros and cons of every decade’s fashionable API technology: CORBA to SOA to RESTful
- How to prototype a system integration over email
- The Mythical Man Month
- Joel On Software
- When to use Trello. When to go full-Project
- The best service stations west of London
- The fastest way to transfer through DFW, CDG and DXB
- For everything else, there’s The Guide to Modern OSS