"Because awesome things sometimes look a lot less awesome from the inside"

Alasdair Allen hits it right on the head: We’ve built a culture where it’s hard to acknowledge that you don’t know something, because knowing things is intricately linked with the doing of awesome things — which in turn is linked to our stature with our peers. Something I’ve noted, talked about, and tried to work on for years: being able to say “I don’t know.” I work with some folks that just cannot say those words. There’s stuff you know you know, there’s stuff you know you don’t know, and there’s stuff you don’t know you don’t know. The last category is dangerous. The last category is where people who always have an answer, right or wrong, put you and …

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Explaining Things Simply

Humans try to make everything really, really complicated. Sometimes we need the complexity but we often do it just because we can. We do it without thinking about it, perhaps a subliminal way of telling people to check out our species’ big brains. It’s also the way we write. We write long and complicated emails, memos, documents, blog posts, whatever. We use big words when we could very easily use smaller ones. Think about all the times you’ve used the word “utilize.” You don’t need that word, ever. Another word you never need is “bespoke.” People who use those kinds of words are writing so that nobody will read or understand them, which is a complete waste of time for …

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Cloud Isn't Really About Technology

If there was one concept about “the cloud” I wish more people understood it is that the cloud is not a technological revolution. Sure, a faster and more pervasive Internet helps, but we’ve had vendor-hosted applications for years. Virtualization has created better opportunities for server infrastructure, lowering barriers to entry and helping us squeeze blood out of things we once treated as rocks. But, despite being almost continuously conflated with “cloud,” it isn’t the cloud. Not by itself. The cloud is about people and about process. It’s about organizations deciding to talk to each other internally, to collaborate and solve problems together. Cloud is about opening the door to automation and security and scalability, asking computers to do what they …

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