OODA Is the New Agile

 As a student in a communist country I was not taught about budgeting - the mysteries of resource management were reserved for a reduced number of people tasked by political leaders with the elaboration of the famous five-year plans.

Even the director boards of the biggest companies were receiving fixed funds, fixed salary levels, and strict limits on import goods. The lead economist of each entity was sending periodically a budget plan to the appropriate ministry or local authority, but he/she received approval only for the amounts of resources considered necessary by the "higher forums".

This enormously long and slow decision loop has created the false perception of economic stability in simple people, and the illusion of infallibility in the dominant class. And the regime was disintegrating slowly but surely, each bad decision contributing to the process.

The poverty produced and/or maintained by inadequate governances is affecting numerous countries, which have never experienced a communist dictatorship. So a low standard of living per se does not seem to lead to the replacement of this particular social contract, rather the incapability of the decision process to operate adaptations to the changing environment.

The agile way of managing resources is giving adequate results in the realm of a globalized market dominated by rapid technical and economical changes. While self-management, and regularly hunting for  temporary contracts is a pill hard to swallow for many people grown in a country offering generous financial aids, for billions agile is not a new lifestyle, and in most private companies the manager's role comes together with a money fund for hiring/firing people and purchasing goods, and a calendar with goals to achieve and milestones to add in.

In a fast-paced world the director board is great for defining strategic goals, but excessively controlling the other decision makers would hinder people from adding value to the company's product. It's not a coincidence, that soft skills like team work and good communication are highly appreciated in agile companies, that's the way how they work.

Last but not least, the army for a society is like the immune system for the human body, a necessary evil operating with the best possible technology. That's why OODA was developed by an air force colonel, and it was borrowed by the IT&C industry. When a small team of flying units are patrolling half of Europe, then their mutual respect and trust are making history.

Free Lunch

 The latest happenings in the realms of the crypto business and social media giants are confirming the thesis that "the free market will always regulate itself". The IT&C people with some business acumen or analytical skills were aware that changes were around the corner in both noisy domains.

In my opinion using crypto does make sense for exchanging currencies in certain unusual situations, but neither for regular shopping nor for savings. In general, supporting a cult of tricky guys at the expense of creative and hardworking people is leading to a non-resilient society.

In contrast to the web3 projects absorbing numerous juniors, the big social media companies were trying to attract seasoned workforce and retaining top talents. The novelty of digital marketing technologies and user tracking produced a hype around the AI algorithms developed and maintained by social media giants, and it generated a big number of jobs.

The data collected by user tracking can be used for showing personalized content to the user, for market analysis, and various predictions. As most people won't pay a membership fee for using social media, these companies are making money with adverts.

Over the years Facebook reinvented itself as the main global facilitator of local businesses, but Twitter was trying to keep an acceptable balance between offering a great experience to their unique mesh of communities and showing targeted adverts. 

While Facebook has been growing an algorithm focused on precisely targeted adverts and content of the user's liking, Twitter was building an algorithm meant to bring together people interested in similar ideas, activities, or projects. In this respect Twitter's algorithm was offering a unique social value - at least until the company's recent acquisition.

In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft and repurposed as a hiring & carrier building site. I consider that for the time being their social media features are not really relevant. 

In 2019 the free tier of Google+ was shut down. They concluded that they got too many challenges for the existing user base. In other words, running an average social media site needs paying subscribers. In order to get the economies of scale necessary for supporting a freemium package (free lunch) the minimum number of unique users could be around 200 million - that would explain E.M.s great interest in counting the bots.

Enterprise vs Commercial Apps

 From the user's point of view there is no clear difference between them. The marketing narrative has always been that an app used in various big companies is a safe choice for small-medium businesses. You know.. if this or that cool-looking app is used in X company by thousands of executives, then it must be great for your shop.

From the developer's point of view the landscape has changed drastically during the last decades. In the 80s the hardware and software were not too sophisticated, it was possible to draft a compiler in a couple of weeks. Nowadays in a couple of weeks we may get ready the first demo of an app based on existing frameworks, third-party components, and services.

Over the years the software development tools have grown in complexity, have gone through differentiation and specialization processes in order to serve a rapidly growing number of domains and use cases.

As a result an IT&C student willing to work at an enterprise needs to acquire experience in specific ERP or CRM software. Configuring and administering standardized cloud-based solutions, and creating workflows with their designer extensions require a significant learning curve.

In case our IT&C student is willing to work in a software shop, he or she needs to acquire experience in  scripting languages, tools, and procedures came into existence for growing and maintaining commercial apps. Mastering all that also needs much time and dedication.

A specialist in enterprise software needs professional reconversion and years of experience to become specialist in commercial software, and vice versa, because both domains are evolving and changing rapidly.

And who is the winner? The infrastructure guys. Always. We all need a well functioning network infrastructure. That's why the software giants are investing in data centers, submarine cables, satellites, and security.

Relativization

Two years ago many millions of jobs have disappeared practically overnight, and people facing eviction or living on welfare were pushed to start shifting towards a new economic structure.

At present my zone is covered by half a dozen of delivery networks, and some of their agents are using  handhelds with great software - so where there is a will, there is a way.

The employees required to work from home have faced a more or less tough accommodation period. While telecommuting is not a new invention, it's an entirely different story if you've chosen that lifestyle as a good fit for your personality, or you were required to stay at home against your wish.

The protagonists of the big resignation are people with sufficient financial reserves to carry out successfully a professional reconversion, or their skillsets are currently in high demand. These guys have  experienced the pros and cons of their work environments, and have decided that they have enough.

The big quit is not a phenomenon in the Silicon Walley but a general tendency, including my country. People facing the passing away of a loved one are experiencing high stress levels, even if not entirely consciously. In most cases this process is determining them to reconsider their goals, plans, and priorities.

Working from home is great while we can meet in person whenever we want, because those water cooler conversations have always been the best quality food for our brains. The undesired isolation made us understood that we are social beings, we need each other to become our best selves.

The too frequent and too  long virtual meetings have triggered debates about how good or bad is agile,  Jira, and many other productivity tools. Is the wire or software the culprit for someone loving to listen his/her own voice, or not ready to organize his/her ideas, or pushing for nonsense processes? 

Quitting is about following our own calling without hurting others. The pandemic taught us to relativize the importance of money in our lives, and to value people more than processes.

Hello PWA!

 About 20 years after the advent of the World Wide Web Google presented a new concept of web application: the PWA. This young cousin of the classic web applications has more capabilities than an ordinary website, but its access to features originally reserved to native applications is limited by the host OS.

The "cross platform and cross browser" characterization is not realistic for any kind of software application, not even for static websites. And more power comes with more responsibility: the PWA programmer has to elaborate a cache management strategy, has to get familiar with IndexedDB or one of its wrappers, has to keep in mind that LocalStorage and SessionStorage cannot be accessed by the ServiceWorker, and implementing certain features on Apple devices is not a walk in the park, or it's not possible at all.

Developing and maintaining a PWA is more demanding than working with a web application - that's why I've avoided so far to try out this genre. Now, after learning more about the subject matter I  understand that the automated services offered for converting websites into PWAs might generate app icons, splash screens, error pages, a manifest, and some broilerplate code for the ServiceWorker - which eventually won't error out from start, but JS code development and refactoring are needed to get it right.

The evolution of browsers and operating systems is going against hybrid apps - programmers using Ionic or similar tools are pushed to diversify their knowledge bases. The general tendency of the software giants to improve support for PWAs, and the spreading of PWAs as website replacements are pushing web developers to get familiar with this technology.

PWAs have been designed to enhance the user experience, and the designer's vision has met the user's real needs.

Installing Jupyter Notebook with PIP

After spending years with online office solutions I've felt nostalgic for some desktop number crunching, and I've managed to install Jupyter Notebook on my old desktop with 32-bit Windows 10 and Python 3.8.

It took me some rounds of Internet research to troubleshoot the issues I've gotten during the process, but  doing a couple of ML home-works does not require the latest and greatest client machine. 

For interested visitors: below are the steps.

1. Update your PIP (the package manager is updated frequently, and getting the latest version might prevent certain issues).

pip install --upgrade pip

2. Install "wheel" in order to prevent a possible failure in step (3).

pip install wheel

3. Install the Jupyter Notebook module.

pip install notebook

4. Check the installation, (if you've gotten nonfatal errors during the installation process, the software might work as expected).

jupyter --version

5. Start the notebook server - your notebooks will run in the browser, this is the server module, and its command window indicates its status (be patient until the "home page" gets displayed in a browser tab).

jupyter notebook

6.  The "home page" is a folder view of your local machine, from there you can manage your notebooks, and shut down the notebook server.

7. Adding modules (libraries) to your notebook server, for example "numpy":

A. Create a new notebook or open an existing one.

B. Add a cell, and type in the following command:

%pip install numpy

C. Execute the command (run the cell content) - be patient, the log is displayed only at the end of the installation process.

Execute step (7) whenever you need to add a module, which is not recognized by your Jupiter Notebook installation. For example:

%pip install matplotlib

%pip install pandas

%pip install seaborn

%pip install sklearn

Enjoy the journey!

Cables Into the Cloud

 The first undersee telegraph cable was laid in 1850 between England and France, and then TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable with repeaters was inaugurated in 1956. It took more than a century to develop an economically feasible technical solution for preserving the signal quality.

Nowadays 99% of the intercontinental communication traffic is carried over by submarine cable systems, including 95%-98% of the global Internet traffic. Taking into account that most datacenters are located in buildings, "the cloud" is about sets of terrestrial systems dependent on a multi-vendor undersee cable infrastructure.

Starting with 2008 portable modular datacenters have been offered by IBM, Google, and Sun (pods built into standard shipping containers), and in 2020 Microsoft announced a successful experiment with an underwater pod, but all those still depend on the undersee cables.

Google and Facebook are the biggest investors in undersee communication cables - it's estimated that they own about 29% of the intercontinental cables, followed by Amazon and Microsoft with significantly less percentages.

In 2019 AWS and IBM Cloud announced plans to deploy satellite-based connectivity, but there is a long way to go until that technology will be able to take off the pressure of the underwater network.

The quantum technology is in its early childhood, currently used in cryptography as an alternative to resolve the key exchange problem.

In an epoch dominated by economic and social challenges we can't take for granted that the underwater backbone of the high-speed Internet will stay untouched by bad guys, having alternatives is of key importance. 

Going multi-cloud looks way better from strategic point of view, and on the job market there is already an increasing demand for network infrastructure and security specialists.

The Catch-22 of Certifications

 There are countless options for enhancing your CV, from proctored certification exams to diplomas for completing MOOCs. Some employers are considering your strengths, determination, and achievements within your economic context, others are looking only to your papers.

It's understandable that in construction, transportation, medical or other highly regulated areas maintaining the required study points is a must, but in several countries the certification mania is a cultural thing.

The globalization has increased the demand for internationally recognized skill assessments - numerous multinational companies and startups have been considering the certified task force more attractive for their staffing needs.

As always, the market demand has brought onto the scene the good, the bad and the ugly: from middle priced exams and expensive weekend trainings to a question bank selling industry flourishing in the grey area.

Developed analytic and synthetic thinking, spontaneous reasoning, experience, good time management and prioritization skills, focusing on problem solving under pressure are all needed for getting highly qualified jobs done well. A bank of multiple choice questions elaborated by seasoned practitioners  may mock more or less common situations, but  real-life experience is key for growing professionally.

Between others the Microsoft and ISTQB certification exams have only syllabuses, and the candidates are supposed to acquire significant practical experience and to do research for readings, trainings, study groups for covering the subject matters mentioned in their syllabuses. Then the intentionally tricky exam questions are trying to measure the candidate's skill level and preparedness to act in unexpected circumstances.

Their exams have been taken by millions and consequently they have been receiving a lot of criticism. For example most software developers are avoiding a closed book exam, because dealing with code written by others is essential for doing their jobs, and memorizing too much details is considered a bad thing - due to the millions of objects and features present in their tools.

While I agree with the developers, I consider that the other IT&C specialists many times need to act rapidly in unexpected situations, so memorizing intelligently a considerable amount of information is crucial for diagnosing and solving problems on time and on budget.

With regard to pricing I consider that Microsoft has a very good understanding of the globalized market. Their tiered pricing model is suitable to many countries, and their price level is rather inclusive than exclusive.

The bottom line is that answering correctly 70%, 80% or more of a set of quiz questions does not transform anybody in a skilled professional, and pushing juniors to take exams demanding diversified experience won't add value to the company.

Outsourcing Patterns

 The online work marketplaces are clear exemplifications of the saying "good things come to those who wait". Just like in case of starting a new business, an employee needs to work hard on dozens of smaller and bigger projects until after getting noticed by employers applying best practices in field of outsourcing. 

These best practices are as diverse as the technologies and the customer needs they serve. I'm going to describe a few employer types proven themselves as successful outsourcers during my years spent as a freelancer.

The Craftsman: skilled worker with sound portfolio, good resource management skills and sufficient soft skills to build a team and maintain a positive working atmosphere, even if his or her business is limited by its nature.

The Consultant: highly skilled specialist with a proven track record, who has chosen to start a boutique consulting company, being many more interested in the technical aspects of his or her area of activity than the business aspects. He or she usually hires a complementary team of 1-2 assistants who are able to take care of the administrative tasks.

The Middleman: is usually starting his or her career as a worker with more or less technical skills but great people skills and interest in growing to take up the role of an agency manager. He or she is perceiving the problems as opportunities to acquire the right human resources to solve them, being a magnet to tasks and workforce.

The Scrum Master: a tenacious, constructive person with a rare combination of technical and people skills, acting as a mediator between executives, managers and customers in order to get the job done on time, on budget, and on spec. My personal experience as a member of various scrum teams is verifying the general opinion that performing well as a scrum master is hard, and "many called, few are chosen".

The Growth Hacker: his or her job history is listing managerial roles. None of those roles mentions explicitly the mission of upsizing the business, but the company was growing and its results were improving while he or she was making decisions. Scaling a company is a big challenge and be grateful if you have on your team someone who has the skills to do it right.

Outsourcing Anti-patterns

Beyond the marketing buzz of "getting your job done in one click" (for employers) and respectively "working online makes your life a walk in the park" (for employees) outsourcing is more like a new genre to be mastered both by managers and executives, since getting a job well-done is both art and science.

An online job intermediation company like Freelancer (and many others) is a great place for a youngster to gather experience in human resources, because in a couple of years one can meet a big variety of collaborators - both managers and executives. It's neither easy nor smooth, but the steel is hardened by heat. 

The virtual job markets are very attractive to startups, because this informal work environment with flexible costs is ideal for doing experimentation, the core process for shaping a successful business. Unfortunately the below approaches are rather anti-patterns:

The Brainstormers: if they have a good sense of time management, then you will have to sit too many hours of meetings; otherwise you will be the target of instant text or voice chatting sessions day and night. They have difficulties setting goals and directions, and are expecting the employees to keep the boat floating - in general not a realistic idea.

The Scientists are building experiments and are learning from the outcomes, being more interested in elaborating new experiments than in their product. They have good technical skills but little or no people skills, and the contractors are running away because of the random requirements or an improper manager delegated to drive the business.

The Magicians are promising persistent work hours, consistent bonuses, good business outcomes against the odds. They are funny and charming, it's a pleasure to spend your time with them, but after some time you will need to step back to continue with your life, just like their customers.

The Gold diggers are risk-takers, the first who are taking action within commercial conditions reshaped by political, technical or other changes. They have the necessary people skills to attract work force, but will always avoid to sign a win-win type agreement. Ultimately they are good guys, because they are offering you the chance to get out of some hopeless situation, but on the long run you need to look for opportunities elsewhere, because they are always focused on short-term gigs.

The Godfathers might maintain a familial and caring atmosphere, or an uncertain "divide and rule" environment, or a combination of both. Either way they are expecting employees to listen and execute, and you will never know the differences between their words and thoughts - not a good working recipe on a rapidly changing market.