I was just thinking about organisational change and pondering over how our natural tendency to change is to resist it, when this thought popped up: if resistance to change is so hardwired in our brains, it must serve some purpose -- but what? One of the premises of evolutionary theory is this: if something survives... Continue Reading →
IT Replacing Labour and the Possible Fragility of the Economy
Latest stats on the US Economy, written up about by Andrew McAfee. He posits the fact that unemployment's not going up while other economic stats are might be due to greater IT spend -- technology replacing labour? Seeing what I've seen in my half decade in the workforce I can't say I disagree: too many... Continue Reading →
Risk vs. Uncertainty (Part II): The Secure Print & Scan Edition
I remember once talking to a friend in HR who lamented the fact that her office didn’t have a way to securely scan or print documents. Because she worked in a department with highly sensitive data, I thought that it was strange it wasn’t made available to her. I recommended that she put in a... Continue Reading →
On theory, practice, and Snowflake Schemas
Just the other day I learnt that the data warehouse I was working on was designed using a Star and Snowflake schema. I'd known enough about them to know that this meant the data was set up on fact and "dimensional" tables, but not much other than that. So the moment I had some time... Continue Reading →
Building an Antifragile System
I just completed the testing of a new program I wrote. 500 lines of well-commented code, making debugging easy if necessary. With this program, the reports we run daily in the morning would take 10 minutes instead of the usual hour, and fully-automated too. Without any manual inputs, the potential failure points owing to manual... Continue Reading →
