Contents A process is a machine for spreading responsibility thin “Check with the relevant team” is where decisions go to die A ceiling always turns into a floor The steering committee that decided nothing The people a delay does not touch will always set the pace Naming a single owner is the only fix that works The opposite of process is not chaos. It is a name Sources A process is not only a way…
Contents Sovereignty is a test, not a posture Four questions decide who is in control A rule written into the architecture does not get argued in meetings The missing mandate is the right to say no What sovereignty looks like on an ordinary Tuesday Sovereignty in technology is one of the most used and least defined words in a boardroom. It fills speeches, tenders, and vendor decks. It rarely…
Contents Two cities, one symptom The four dependencies no one audits while things work The decision no one ever made Resilience is a name before it is a value What a leader does before the line cuts A modern company runs on one silent assumption. The connection will be there. It almost always is. That word, almost, is where the risk lives, and no one has ever put a number on it. The day the line…
Contents Ownership has three parts, and only the third one frightens anyone A sovereignty you are handed is inert until someone exercises it The right to cut costs you before it pays you France taught the doctrine and mislaid the practice What the man in the car already knew Sources Real sovereignty is not the capacity you are granted. It is the capacity you are willing to use, and its sharpest…
Contents A balance sheet only tells you half of what a company owes The debt people absorb has no owner, and that is what makes it dangerous A clean modernisation project dies on what nobody wrote down Some people do not just hold the debt, they guard it A CEO cannot audit what they do not know exists Put the off-balance-sheet back on the books Sources Every company carries technical debt it can…
Contents Doing, mastering, and understanding are three different things Escoffier wrote the answer down in 1903 The chef who tries to hold every station loses the kitchen Jeff Bezos set Amazon’s architecture without writing a line of it The non-technical leader makes the chef’s mistake in reverse Understanding is the capacity that survives What this means for how you lead Sources A head chef in a…
Contents A stable decision and a stable patient are the same illusion The paper survives, the ground does not A short story about a tool that was right until it wasn’t The role that keeps decisions fresh is missing from the org chart The person who reopens the file should not be the person who runs it A routine mandate is harder to assign than a crisis mandate The half-life of a decision is…
Contents A Damaged Painting and a Legacy System Pose the Same Question The Original State Is a Myth That Destroys What It Touches Preventive Conservation Acts on the Environment, Not the Work Brandi and the Venice Charter Wrote the Rules Executives Are Missing The Pentimento Always Resurfaces A Luxury House Taught Me What Harmonizing Without Erasing Looks Like The CEO’s Job Is to Choose the…
Contents The Conductor Plays Nothing Audiation: Hearing Without Playing What a Guest Conductor Does Before a Difficult Concert The CEO Who Tries to Learn the Cello The Function Survives the Practice The Concert Belongs to Whoever Plays It Sources A conductor doesn’t play any instrument. Not the cello, not the bassoon, not the oboe. The absence is not a deficiency. It is the condition that allows…
Contents Reports do not lie. They are narrated. Wayne Booth gave us the word in 1961. We never applied it to the audit report. Why technical reports escape the unreliable narrator grid The luxury group that did not know which side to grab The detail that does not fit What changes when a CEO becomes Kujan Sources An information system never lies to its CEO. It is narrated to its CEO. Every audit,…
Contents Tartaria is a mud flood that never happened Anatoly Fomenko built a chronology in which most of history was invented A closed system rewrites its own history, not the world’s Karl Popper drew the line in 1963 and most boards do not know it Organizations ostracize the messenger before reading the message The CEO’s quiet duty is to keep the doctrine falsifiable Three tests for a stack that…
Contents What a Letter of Marque Actually Was The 1681 Ordinance Why This Matters for Modern Tech Contracts The Three Questions Before You Sign Pirates of Modernity The Art of the Return On October 7th, 1800, in the Bay of Bengal, two ships met in conditions that should have produced a quick result. The first was the Kent, an East Indiaman owned by the British East India Company. Forty guns. Four…
Contents Four Dune adaptations, one lesson Frank Herbert, the saturated source The corporate version Three lived examples The contrarian recommendation What to ask of your next report A CEO once handed me an eighty-page IT audit and asked what I thought of it. I read it on the train home. Every page was technically correct. The taxonomy of incidents was rigorous. The vendor benchmark covered the…
Contents The one-sided hearing Charge of proof, inverted The auditor I encountered by accident When the process is perfect and the outcome is unjust The designated fuse What the right to confrontation actually does Who convenes the absent There is a principle in criminal procedure that most people take for granted without understanding what it actually protects. The accused has the right to know…
Contents What the algorithm corrects away The photocopy bias What this looks like in an IS audit The tool versus the oracle Arnaud said it during an internal meeting last week. We were reviewing a deliverable, talking about quality tolerances, the gap between what looks right and what is right. He wasn’t making a point. He was thinking out loud. “The imperfection that creates perfection.” I wrote…
Contents The undercut and the timing of decisions What thresholds don’t tell you The decision that isn’t made where it appears to be made When the safety car comes out The radio problem What I do from the pit wall In Formula 1, there are always two versions of the race happening simultaneously. The version on the pit wall: tire degradation curves updated every sector, gap to competitors measured…
Contents The truck you didn’t stop “We need more data” is not an analytical statement What constraint actually does Recovery speed is the measurement that doesn’t exist The constraint is already there Pekin Express. Two people. One euro a day. No GPS. No hotel reservation. No plan beyond “get to the checkpoint before the elimination.” The show has been running for years. I’ve watched enough…
Contents What happens when the kitchen falls apart The kitchen that runs on heroism The brigade structure and why nobody implements it The question the CEO doesn’t ask A good kitchen is invisible. The food arrives hot. The timing is right. The table doesn’t wait between courses. From the dining room, the experience is seamless, apparently effortless. What the customer doesn’t see: ten minutes ago,…
Contents Nobody reads page 11 The real reason nobody looks What the survey actually reveals The decision to proceed anyway What you’re deciding when you don’t look I know people who signed property contracts without reading the diagnostic report. Not naive people. Smart people with good judgment and functioning careers, who spent months finding the right property, found it, and then treated the…
Contents The brief already has the conclusion The consulting industry has a structural incentive to keep you sick Referred pain The questions I ask that aren’t in the brief What happens when the diagnosis is inconvenient You would never accept a doctor who walks into the examination room, hears you say “my head hurts,” and writes a prescription without touching you. In medicine, that’s a fault. It…
Contents 300 decisions. Per match. With incomplete information. The executives in that room had been spectators Not deciding is also a decision Most companies don’t know who the referee is I sponsor the SCO. I hold a corporate box. I go to almost every home game. For years I thought I understood football. I had opinions about the referee. Loud ones, sometimes. Like every executive who has opinions…
Social benefits and risks from AI Will it help or will it hurt? The social benefit The social risk Some examples Conclusion There’s a lot of talk about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Some people believe that AI will make our lives better, while others fear that it could do harm. We’re not going to settle that debate here–but we will look at what some experts say about how…
Only the bias is biased Types of bias Impact of bias What next? Conclusion Cognitive bias is a phenomenon that occurs when our brain processes information in a way that is systematically different from the way a rational, unbiased mind would. These biases can affect our decision-making, our perceptions and our memory, and they can have a significant impact on our lives. Types of bias There are…
JSON, MongoDB and rsyslog are on a boat JSON is standard Nginx knows about @cee Rsyslog is great. Its documentation is not. That’s not all folks! At the end When dealing with log management, obvious solutions emerge earlier, often before you even discussed the purpose of the log management. We can discuss about ELK , Graylog , Splunk , … Those are great tools but they may not fit will all your…
Too big to fall, not to fail Internet is dead! Nope, just Facebook No one has ever been fired for opting for IBM You said to say Hardy! Me, myself, and the Apocalypse The late US election inspired me, mixed with several of my customers suffering from their providers’ failure, and led me to write this post to remind about the reality, and not someone’s reality. When dealing with a provider, or…
Let's walk in a minefield Avant-Propos Suit up ! I want to blacklist That’s all folks If you manage an infrastructure, you probably always know the same problem: how to properly manage the blacklisting of malicious IPs. If you are on hybrid infrastructures, without adequate equipment for firewalling, this question often arises all the more. And if you want to be proactive, by securing the whole…
Are you a Person of Interest? In the last episode of… Ok, that I’ve turned paranoid… You shall not pass It’s time now Am I safe? Of course, as an individual, you’re an interesting person. But are you a Person of Interest? By that I mean, are you a person that it is individually interesting to hack, or are you just a person who is immersed in the mass of data that the hacker has targeted? With the…
My neighbor is noisy Some quick reminder My noisy neighbor is named… My neighbor moves me Let me be! Do you agree? Don’t worry, I won’t discuss about my personal neighbors during the Covid-19 confinement. Lately, several of my customers had random and difficult-to-diagnose issues with their Cloud instances. As this is not related to a specific provider (some of them are using AWS while the others…
Feedback on a geo-rep GlustserFS 7.3 setup But why ? The setup And then there’s the drama Did you think it was over? One more thing… Recently, I had to build a geo-replicated GlusterFS setup and encountered a bunch of issues due to the not-so-up-to-date documentation and the unlucky thing . So much time spent reviewing things and discussing with the dev team over IRC. Here’s my (recent) life with…
A virus ? An opportunity? Dependency on Asia… Dependency on non-education of the lower classes What about… And so? Your opportunity ? While the world is watching as much news about the spread of Coronavirus as it is taking its temperature, business discussions are revolving around the global economic slowdown, forcing the various Central Banks and other financial organizations to meet to agree on…
What? Agile ? Infrastructure ? And so ? Making the infrastructure agile Recently, I had a rather interesting discussion with some of my clients over Slack: Agile processes applied to Infrastructure. At the beginning, we did not reach a common ground, but we quickly realized that the problem was not our approaches, but our vocabulary. Agile? Infrastructure? Once we agreed on these terms, the…
What? The Hacker The Stabilizer The Industrializer So? VP Engineering CIO CTO For a few months now, there have been a lot of articles explaining that there are 3 types of CTO: the hacker, the stabilizer, and the industrializer. Although accurate in substance, these articles are incomplete when we go into practice. But why is that? Let’s start by going over these three types again. The Hacker You…
rewrite ^/that-s-my-original-uri/(with-my-folder)/(.*) $ /that-s-my-destination $ $1 / $2 last ; See the $$1 ? Are you trying to use a $ in the destination of your rewrite rule ? Then you may have try escaping it, and found out you can only do it via some LUA scripting you might not want or a third party plugin that you can’t use for X or Y reason. The constant result of this situation ? nginx:…
On a global purpose of optimisation of my website, I lately added some features and enhanced the HTTP2 delivery of the website. The performance restults are instantaneous. But, as there is always a but, it generated some random issues … with Google Chrome (and it’s opensource pendant, Chromium). The consequence of the bug was a almost random “Aw, Snap !” page : every time I clicked on an internal…
(Just splendid …)
A few weeks ago, I decided to move from Wordpress to a more flat blog engine. After some test, I chose to use Jekyll. I may write a blogpost about this and the related motivation but this is not the actual topic. During the setup, I needed to implement a search engine. As Jekyll is a flat blog engine, I can’t really implement any dynamic solution. My solution was to implement a lunr.js on the…
Lately I discovered an issue with my WiFi adapter on my professional laptop (a Lenovo T450) : it was not working. Pretty inconvenient. After some digging, I tested and had to adapt part of things I found on Google. So, to begging with, the symptoms : no more wireless adapter in my NetworkManager or any other tools, including ifconfig dmesg reports issues loading the iwlwifi firmware< The dmesg…
So, lately, we decided to truly use several different computers at home. The fun part is that we want to share the same peripherals (as the multi-functional printer (here, as an HP PhotoSmart B109a), with different OS (for now, Linux and Windows). Let’s see how our Synology saved the day. The Synology NAS embed a Linux system so basically, we should be able to run most of the applications, as far…
It’s Saturday morning. Some might just have a hangover. Others running all around. And a few, just do nothing (as me …. nah just kidding). So the Super Bowl was a month ago so let’s enjoy a compilation of all the Trailers and TV Spots to boost this weekend. Cheers up !
Recently, I decided to move from a decent desktop setup to a desktop replacement setup. Here’s the why and the how of this move.</p> For years, I had a barebone on my desktop with a huge screen : Xeon CPU with 4 core, but low voltage 8 GB Ram Nvidia Geforce ..... 128 GB SSD Dell 30" As I stopped playing on my computer for at least the last 4 years, I noted several disadvantages of such setup : It…
If, as me, you own a Galaxy S6 Active (SM-G890A) from AT&T, and you can’t update to Android 5.1.1, here is your solution. Over the last year, I busted two mobiles : I missed my pocked when trying to fit my phone in : the floor didn’t missed it, especally the screen The other one tried to swim without protection, whereas I put it into an airtight bag, in an airtight box, to prevent any issue … long…
Une quinzaine de jours est passée depuis mon dernier billet. Pas tant parce qu'il n'y avait rien a raconté, mais plutôt qu'il faut du temps et de l’énergie pour le faire. On continue donc la découverte du Kung-Fu traditionnel, mixé à la découverte de Chengdu. Comme introduit dans le premier billet, le kung-fu n'est pas juste un art martial mais est un art de vivre. Celui-ci s'accompagne donc de…
Les jours s'enchainent sans vraiment se ressembler. Nous continuons de consommer notre lot quotidien de sport, culture kungfu-iste, de piments, le tout enrobé de zénitude et de plaisirs. Peu de jours se sont écoulés depuis mon billet du nouvel an. Pourtant, tellement de choses ont été vécues. Ainsi, la fin de semaine a continué de s'écouler avec du sport avant de nous offrir une fin de samedi…
Pour beaucoup, ce n'est pas une surprise : je suis en Chine pour quelques semaines. La précision importante ici est qu'il s'agit d'une immersion dans la campagne chinoise avec un entrainement intensif au Wu Shu. Cela fait donc quelques jours que je suis arrivé. Etonnamment, un énorme brouillard recouvrait la ville de Chengdu, dans le Sichuan. Bon, je dis étonnamment car ce n'est quasiment pas du à…
https://youtu.be/mKrlkMnAVJE