Be a Leader in Thought and Deed

If you have seen my LinkedIn Feed, you probably know that I’ve taken a new job leading Information Technology for biBerk Business Insurance. With the role change, I did a little reflection on habits and attitudes that have served me well over the years. For 2024, I’m going to do a series of those reflective thoughts and keep them to one-third to half of the length of what I’ve averaged over the last couple of years. I’m also going to try a bit different style, focusing on making these more like notes instead of articles. This time, a little thinking on thought leadership and working with your “head in the clouds and feet on the ground”.

Security and Obscurity

An oft-repeated guideline in securing technology is that we should not rely on obscurity to secure our systems. As we wind down 2023, I use this article to take a brief look at that guideline.

Hiatus Almost Over

A quick update and explanation why I’ve missed the last two months’ posts: We’ve moved from Illinois to the Pacific Northwest of the US. With all the planning, moving, driving, waiting for stuff to show up, etc., I held off on doing any more blog posts for the duration.

I expect to resume posting monthly in December.

Support Open Source

Last week brought a little bit of drama to the dotnet development community. The popular open source testing framework Moq briefly moved out of open source and into shareware without much warning. Daniel Cazzulino, the maintainer of Moq, has already indicated the next generation of Moq will have some form of commercial license. The way it was done was inelegant but the reason was all to common: Cazzulino decided he needed more financial support to continue. While I think he could have handled it better, I don’t blame him — we all have bills to pay. The lack of financial support for people who maintain key software is an understated risk in the modern software landscape. Every organization which builds or uses modern software is relying on a massive ecosystem of open source software (OSS). Most enterprises do zero to help those OSS teams who in turn rely on people who are basically volunteers.

What do we expect a volunteer team will do when they are looking at their own bank accounts and realizing the extra hours they put in for free are making other people money? What happens when they conclude that they can’t really support this free product and work a full-time job to pay the bills? What are they to do when they reach the back nine of middle age and discover their retirement prospects don’t look great?

Choosing Tools to Make Your Life Harder

In this article, I discuss some of my thoughts on how tools can make some tasks harder while making others easier and what it means for our organizations. I also go into why adopting a tool that makes some tasks harder may not be all that bad and touch on a strategy or two for managing these tools. I’m considering this a first public draft rather than a final article. I am curious how you all see it.