Okay, another friend got hacked yesterday – here’s how to build an un-hackable password: 1. Pick a favorite date, like Bastille Day, your dog’s birthday, the moon landing or something. You could also do something like a favorite movie mixed with it’s author’s name. 2. Reverse it, so for example today would be 8102voN82. You […]
Category Archives: Work
Leadership of IT/Software Teams in a Regulatory Environment
Part 3 – now let’s introduce regulation First part of this, is let’s define “regulation” in context. Specifically, I’m referring to ISO 13485, EU medical devices (GMP, or “Good Manufacturing Practice”), and FDA medical device standards. Let’s also be clear, these aren’t just “guidelines” (insert Barbarossa quote here), they’re law. As law, what is their […]
Leadership of IT/Software Teams in a Regulatory Environment
Part 2 – How Does This Apply to IT? All right, so we’ve laid out what it means to be a leader – but how does this apply to IT? At this stage we have to look at what it means to work in an IT environment – and there are some wildly different attitudes […]
Leadership of IT/Software Teams in a Regulatory Environment
Leadership of IT/Software Teams in a Regulatory Environment Thomas Theobald Part 1 – What Exactly Is “Leadership”? leadership /ˈliːdəʃɪp/ noun “the action of leading a group of people or an organization, or the ability to do this.” Not exactly helpful, are they? Wikipedia is slightly better: “is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing […]
Why do I choose Delphi?
Why? Really, why do I? In a world full of PHP, Java, Visual Studio, Python, Lua, and all these other syntaxes, what is it about Delphi that brings me back time and time again? First off, let’s be clear – it’s not an exclusive choice. I still do use Python if I have to code […]
Multipliers Don’t Create
Well, that’s a rather general topic, isn’t it? Okay, let’s get specific: in the last twenty years, computers and software, roughly labeled “technology,” have become absolutely ubiquitous and necessary in first-world business. And yet, human expectations of them have been rather wildly unrealistic, generally being let down in spite of the successes they bring. These […]
KPIs for a QA Team
This post is somewhat less than lengthy, but I figure this will be of some use regardless. A while back I was doing KPI discussions for various groups, and got distracted. Here’s what I measure for QA personnel: Bugs that escape into production: anything that gets out the door and into a production piece of […]
KPIs Part II – As Applied to a Technical Support department
This is Part 2 of a series – Part 1 can be found here So…part 2 of this series will take a look at the KPIs appropriate for a Technical Support department. In order to arrive at what elements of performance are both measurable and key to the department, we have to investigate what the […]
Problems in Retail
I was asked recently (during an interview) what my view of the retail world was – as an open-ended question and not focused on the aspects of how to use technology to provide a solution, I stumbled over it. It was playing at the back of my mind, and I realized why I stumbled – […]
Key Performance Indicators in IT – part 1
I was asked recently by a company as part of their first-round hiring process a question very similar to this: How would you establish measurement of the departments under you in such a way that you would have an indication that they are operating well? What would these things mean? How would you go about […]