Shopify Chief Executive Tobi Lütke sent an internal memo that said Shopify won’t make new hires unless managers can prove artificial intelligence isn’t capable of doing the job. Teams at the e-commerce company need to integrate AI into their workflows, and doing so will be expected of all employees going forward, according to the memo. This post "AI First" Hiring Starts Now first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Businesses don’t always realize as they grow and mature they add “weight”, or more accurately, “mass”. The more massive an object, the more energy required to change its direction. This post Less Mass = More Agility first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
“The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capa...| Dan Stroot · Blog
We are increasingly aware of the basic risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI), such as generating harmful advice, producing buggy code, and spreading inaccurate (or misleading) information. Some of us have even considered the dangers of AI providing accurate information for nefarious purposes (e.g. "How do I make a ghost gun?"). However, a larger societal risk looms — the possibility of AI models manipulating humans and escaping human control. Should we be worried? Is this reall...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Customer care is undergoing a transformation unlike anything we've seen before. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) agents are proliferating across communication channels — handling real-time voice calls, managing text-based interactions such as chat, SMS, and email, and delivering a level of efficiency that traditional customer service teams often struggle to achieve. However, the horizon promises even more revolutionary possibilities. This post Customer Care: Supermodel AI Agents first ap...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Gardeners don't 'create' or 'produce' tomatoes. They can only create an environment where tomato plants will thrive. The point is if the environment is healthy, growth happens. There are a lot of factors to consider - the quality of the soil, the weather, pests... the list goes on. Similarly, how do we create healthy growth in our organizations? This post Healthy Things Grow first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect increasing the value of someone else's vote. This post There is no such thing as not voting first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Today I read that hospitals in Germany said they would cancel elective procedures; in Britain, some doctors in the National Health Service were unable to gain access to systems. Sky News, a major news channel in Britain, could not operate. At JPMorgan Chase there were delays in processing trades because bankers could not log into their work systems. How do we prevent this? This post CrowdStrike Nightmare first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
According to Ben Horowitz "peacetime" and "wartime" CEOs require radically different management styles. I believe this concept applies to CIOs as well. As an effective CIO, you never just take a job. You are accepting a mission. This post The Adaptive CIO: Peacetime vs. Wartime Leadership first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I once worked with an organization that developed five year strategic plans, while at the same time teaching its employees that we live in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. See the irony? Either planning or reacting - organizations best able to adapt to their environment win. This post Rethinking Strategy: Planning vs. Reacting first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs — which seems fanciful and naive. The nature of problem-solving is we are aware of problems long before we are aware of their solutions. There will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve. To solve them we must believe we can. This post Pessimists sound smart. Optimists change the world. first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Do you how bees communicate with each other to share information about food sources? The bees communicate this critical information by performing a type of dance called the waggle dance. The other bees then follow the instructions and go harvest the flowers. Yet, some bees ignore the dance. Why? This post Adventure Bees first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
When hiring software engneers I look beyond technical talent. What I really want is someone who understands "the ecosystem" they work in. Recruiting is always challenging. I think this is a good start to help you spot the great ones. This post On Being a Modern Software Explorer first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Companies say they want engaged employees. Funny, I’ve never heard an employee say they wanted to be "engaged" (at least not to their company). Personally, I’d much rather be inspired. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in a weekend. Inspiration literally brings the future forward like a time machine. This post Inspiration is a Time Machine first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Having worked in financial services for most of my career I want to share some the software engineering challenges that are associated with tracking and moving money digitally. Most of these lessons have been learned the hard way. Hopefully they will be useful to anyone moving into the fintech space. This post Fintech Engineering Challenges first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
We think that generative AI creativity is limited by its training data and algorithms, and therefore can produce technically proficient content, but not truly novel and innovative content. We like to believe that our own creativity and innovation, rooted in personal experience, knowledge, and human emotions results in intentionality and emotional depth that cannot be replicated by AI. Current research contradicts that view. This post ChatGPT-4 is More Creative than You first appeared on Dan S...| Dan Stroot · Blog
The Biden administration has collected “voluntary commitments” from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to pursue shared AI safety and transparency goals ahead of a planned executive order. Will it be enough? This post Voluntary AI Safety? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Corporate bullsh*t can be a handy supply of manure for fertilizing new ideas and innovation. Corporate bullsh*t also has a number of negative effects on both employees and organizations, including a tendency to suppress those with differing opinions and perspectives. The most detrimental consequence of rampant organizational bullsh*t is the corrosion of organizational decision-making. Can you spot it? This post Corporate Bullsh*t first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow) describes system re-writes as “the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make”. However, engineering teams love full rewrites because they incorrectly think of old systems as specs. They assume that since the old system works, all functional aspects have been settled. Design risks have been eliminated! They can focus on making changes to the underlying architecture without worry. This is a deeply flawed assumpt...| Dan Stroot · Blog
“We just landed one of the biggest deals in our company’s history. To close the deal, we promised the customer a few things. I trust you to make it happen. Don’t worry, what they want is really basic.” This post Estimates are a Business Function, not an Engineering Function first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Bob joined the company six months ago. Bob is working hard and super excited about everything he’s getting done. He feels like he’s doing the best work of his career, cranking out tons of great stuff, going way above and beyond. It feels great and he can’t wait for his review when Gloria will recognize all his effort and contribution. Except one day, in one of their one-on-ones, Gloria gives Bob a thin-lipped smile and takes a deep breath and tells him that he’s underperforming. This ...| Dan Stroot · Blog
I wrotes these principles down in 2015. At the time they felt "visionary". Looking back now I love these principles even more, but they seem obvious and ordinary now. This post Architecture Principles first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
“Companies that make software must have the freedom to innovate, but they must also be held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care they owe consumers, businesses, or critical infrastructure providers. Responsibility must be placed on the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes, not on the end-users that often bear the consequences of insecure software…” This post The 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy is a wake-up call for software developer...| Dan Stroot · Blog
When an engineer designs a bridge, they begin with the load the bridge is intended to bear, and they calculate the various stresses caused by wind, earthquakes, etc. They then apply a safety factor to the calculations. Engineering software is nothing like this. This post Engineering Software is Nothing Like Engineering a Bridge first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
What are the differences between a committee and a working group? Working groups relax hierarchy to allow people to solve problems across organizational units, whereas committees both reflect and reinforce organizational boundaries and hierarchies. This post Committees vs. Working Groups first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The big news in 2022 has been the rise of “generative” AI models. Generative models generate things: text, code, images, and even music! What is a fun example of how we can use a generative AI model? Let's use AI to analyze your dreams! This post Analyze Your Dreams using AI first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Jeff Bezos: I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s a very interesting question. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. This post What's Not Going To Change first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Anyone who has ever been responsible for supporting production systems learns many valuable things along the way. For example... This post Lessons We All Learn first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
In late 2021 Facebook rebranded itself Meta, reorganizing around a single concept: the metaverse. Over the course of 2021 Meta's Reality Labs division spent $12.5 billion dollars - in a single year - building the metaverse. Why? Because the metaverse will track behavioral and biometric information at a record scale. This post Privacy is going to suck in the Metaverse first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I recently read the book "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. One premise is that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong, so design them to be easy to change. It is a wonderful book on complex systems, and the whole time I was reading it I was also thinking of it metaphorically as creating software. This post How Software Learns first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The way programming is taught is usually aligned to how computers work (why variables are 16, 32 or 64 bits) and language constructs and syntax. However, the way I learned coding was not how we teach coding. I learned by building things. What motivates learning for beginners? This post Teaching Coding vs. Learning Coding first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Microservices exist because teams want to make their own choices, dislike code review or overbearing ‘architects’ above them, and to a lesser extent want to try different and newer languages. This feels good, but... This post Microservices: A Technical Solution to a People Problem? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Lately, everyone seems to want to talk about technology risk. I am not referring to cybersecurity risks, I am referring to the big operational types of risks (outside your information security program) that could cause a sizable impact to your business. As a CIO for over 20 years, I want to share what keeps me up at night... This post Risky Business first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Most company values are just a bunch of undifferentiated "nice things". Which company wouldn’t say they are about honesty, teamwork, or passion? The problem is employees can’t easily turn those words into actions. They don’t tell us how to "walk the tightrope" and balance our decisions. Why not? This post Values or Beliefs? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Paul Graham is one of the best-known VC success stories, and is a founder of Y Combinator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 2,000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. Paul has never read a business plan or a balance sheet. Why not? This post Vision and Talent or Planning? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Bloomberg installed a framed New Yorker cartoon in every conference room in its New York headquarters that reads: “I know we didn’t accomplish anything, but that’s what meetings are for.” What ways can we use to make meetings disappear? This post Make Meetings Disappear first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
When building a new product, we all know we should remain agile and launch something small and simple to start. Then, over time, we can make that product more functional by listening to our customers and adding more features. Unfortunately, the same process wreaks havoc when it comes to modernizing an existing system. At first, the reason why is not intuitive. In theory, the same principles should apply. This post Dangerous MVPs first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
One of the most common mistakes I see is thinking of people as interchangeable, as if “who” doesn’t matter. Companies will plan out the next few quarters of work and then assign some number of people to it, one person for one quarter to a project, two people for three quarters to another, etc. The roadmap creation and review process perpetuates the polite fiction that people are interchangeable, that people can be generically abstracted over. This post Individuals Matter first appeared ...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Can companies create human "denial of service" attacks against their own employees? They can and they do - all in the name of collaboration and 'making the business better'. If you work in a large organization you will recognize the pattern. Here's how it works... This post Human Denial of Service Attacks first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
When measuring culture note that culture is an outcome. If you could measure culture directly, you would be measuring a result - e.g. the current state (kind of like reading the speedometer in your car). Does simply knowing the current state help you improve it, or do you have to go deeper? This post Culture - Measure what you Treasure first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
You are contributing value, whether you like it not, when you make your code public. Training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community. The models gain insight and accuracy from the public collective intelligence. The only way to extract value back out is to use Copilot yourself. This post Mob Programming with 65 Million of Your Peers first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The answer will depend primarily on how quickly the technology team contained the infection, how much effort it will be to eradicate the malware and restore the systems and data, and whether backups are immutable. Many victims still pay the ransom even when they have the means to restore everything from backups on their own. Why? This post Are we Paying the Ransom or Not? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
People go into technology because they love building new things, solving business problems, and making businesses operate better. The last thing on earth most technologists want to say is “no”. When your technology team starts telling you no it may be that they are feeling overwhelmed. There are many unintuitive signs that indicate a technology team might be overwhelmed or underfunded, such as buying premium support contracts, or using expensive consultants. Read on to learn the telltale ...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Every team has manual procedures or checklists that they haven’t gotten around to automating yet. Sometimes there are branches and special cases to keep track of as you go. Procedures/checklists are frustrating because they’re focus-intensive yet require very little thought. They demand our full attention, but our attention isn’t rewarded with interesting problems or satisfying solutions – just another checkbox checked. This post Executable Documentation first appeared on Dan Stroot's...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Recently I took on a new role and I was considering ordering new business cards. I reflected a moment and realized I don't really use business cards anymore. I decided that I needed a digital way to share my business (and personal) information, and I wanted to be able to control what I share. One of the side benefits of this is I don't have to share my personal mobile phone number either. This post "Digital" Business Card? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Years ago I read a great article on clear communication. Unfortunately it is hard to find these days. I am reproducing it here for posterity and full attribution. This post I'm OK; the Bull is Dead. first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
As of this writing, in early 2019 Sears announced it is near liquidation, with a $4.4B bid to keep operating. At the same moment, on the same day, Amazon.com is the most valuable company in the world with an $810B valuation, or 184 times greater. Prior to Amazon's founding Sears had everything. Global supply chain, check. Top notch distribution operation, check. System and infrastructure to take orders and handling billing, check. Brand recognition and established customer base, check. Unfort...| Dan Stroot · Blog
There is a post from 2005 by Benji Smith in the old (and now closed) Joel on Software Discussion Group. It is titled "Why I Hate Frameworks". But I know it as "the hammer factory" post. It is just brilliant, even 13 years later. I am reproducing it here for posterity in case the old Joel on Software Discussion Group ever disappears. This post Hammer Factories first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Web development has evolved faster than nearly every other software engineering discipline. The pace of innovation has been relentless, and front-end developers are confronted with new frameworks, tools, and standards for “modern” web development **constantly**. Framework fatigue is real thing. This post Modern Web Development first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
A year ago I wrote about how big data, collected from social media sites, and machine learning was used to influence voting in the United States in "The man least likely to succeed in politics". Collecting data, and more specifically social data about each of us, has been described as the "new goldrush". Yet many of us are unaware of how technology is enabling the use (and misuse) of our personal data. As a technologist I find this area fascinating and evolving rapidly. This post Facebook sus...| Dan Stroot · Blog
I have already described the "inside out" corporation. This idea was first evangelized by Google (who know a thing or two about infrastructure and security) and they called it "BeyondCorp". This post Turn Your Company Inside-Out for $3/mo first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Internet access is so fundamentally important that many people believe that Internet access should be a legal right. The British government has said that it will guarantee a legal right to high-speed internet for all homes and businesses in the U.K. by 2020 under the Digital Economy Act of 2017. Regardless of your belief in the Internet as a legal right, we should all be able to agree that access to the Internet promotes the digital economy and improves the lives of all citizens. This post Wh...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Do you want to become invincible? I mean “rock solid”; impenetrable; bullet-proof? The answer is simple: strive to **be the truth**. This post How to Become Invincible first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
In every organization I have worked with managing user authentication and passwords was a huge challenge. The key issue was that the "old" password best practices were **failed attempts to fix the user, not the system**. This post Finally: Some Sane Password Advice first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The Second Amendment was passed fifteen years after the American Revolution, in 1791, as part of the Bill of Rights. This was just three years after the Constitution was ratified in 1788. The complete Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." James Madison originally proposed the Second Amendment as a way to provide more power to s...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Most companies still have a separate corporate network, protected by firewalls, intrusion prevention/detection, dedicated administrators, VPNs, etc. Why is it that I can access information which is the most important, private, and precious to me, from any computer, via any network, without all that extra cost, complexity, overhead, and effort? This post The Inside-Out Corporation first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Dick Nixon understood that getting the smart, popular kids to vote for you didn't matter. He called the popular kids "Franklins" and he called his kind the "Orthogonians". Nixon discovered that being hated by the "Franklins" was no impediment to political success. This post The Man Least Likely to Succeed in Politics first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
When I was growing up, when you read the paper, watched the news, saw a film or a picture, you inherently believed in it. You trusted the reality it portrayed. You trusted in journalism and even believed the news was actually "fair and balanced". Then technology destroyed the business model of traditional journalism. This post Free to Believe Anything first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Saw the new Microsoft Surface Studio this weekend at the Microsoft store at the South Coast Plaza. I thought the display is pretty mind blowing. I have gotten used to wide screen displays but somehow the resolution and format of the screen just feels right. The display floats in space and fills your field of vision. This post Microsoft Surface Studio is Mindblowing first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Is there a such thing as perfect security? In the 1770s Joseph Bramah created a lock that was vastly superior to any the world ever seen. Bramah believed it was 100% theft-proof. It was, and then it wasn't. This post It’s secure… until it’s not first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
At one point in time I worked for an organization that banned the use of open source software. They were concerned that in the event of issues "there would be no support". At the time they believed that commercial software from companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP was "safer" because there was a commercial entity that stood behind the products they sold and provided support. Now that's changing... This post Proprietary Software is an Unsafe Building Material first appeared on Dan Str...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Most information security practitioners do a poor job explaining the relative nature of security. Secure relative to what? A bot that looks for un-patched systems? A determined hacker? A nation-state? Security is a "scale of difficulty" – like mountain climbing. Everest was thought to be unclimbable until Sir Edmund Hillary did it. This post Is it Secure? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, they'll make 10 suggestions. Ask them to review 1,000 lines of code and they'll say "it looks good!" This post Why Automate Code Reviews? first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I've been a fan of Microsoft during my whole technical career. However I don't recommend Microsoft any longer for server workloads, and haven't for years due to the fact that the Linux ecosystem is far less expensive and has more innovative people working on it and sharing what they do openly. However, I am very impressed with the direction and leadership of Satya Nadella. This post The "New" New Microsoft first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just released it's annual letter. I have come to look forward to these letters because I find them incredibly inspiring. This year instead of an annual update they are re-baselining and taking a fifteen year view of the future. As I read this year's letter I was simultaneously moved, inspired and awed by the scope their mission. This post Make Big Bets first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Having done some user interface work over the break I discovered that my design approach was... This post Keep it Simple... UX Design first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Today President Barack Obama has come out in favor of net neutrality in very public way. He lays out in no uncertain terms that he believes no cable company or access provider should be able to put limits on access to the Internet. In addition, he’s suggesting that the FCC recognizes access to the Internet as a basic utility, and something that Americans have a basic right to. This means no blocking, no throttling, more transparency and no paid prioritization. This post President Obama's Pl...| Dan Stroot · Blog
The White House announced on Monday, August 11th 2014, that it is formally launching a new U.S. Digital Service and that it has hired Mikey Dickerson to lead it. Mickey Dickerson is an engineer widely credited with playing a central role in salvaging HealthCare.gov. The idea behind the USDS is institutionalizing the approach that saved the US health care website. This post USA's Digital Playbook first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
President Barack Obama, on his first day in office in 2009, signed an executive order stating that all government information that did not have to be kept secret for security or privacy reasons should be made public. The administration also launched the Open Data Initiative to publish government data and the http://www.data.gov website to distribute the data. This post From Open Government to Open Corporation first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I have been playing around with CoreOS to get a sense of how everything works. The vision of this project is incredible. CoreOS describes itself as "a new Linux distribution that has been re-architected to provide features needed to run modern infrastructure stacks. The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience." This post CoreOS: thousands of machines and millions of Docker containe...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Personally I think the next wave of infrastructure efficiency will be driven by Linux container technology (LinuX Containers = LXC). The LXC container approach does not require a hypervisor - instead you run isolated "containers" on a Linux host. LXC provides operating system-level virtualization leveraging cgroups (control groups) to completely isolate the operating environment, including process trees, network, user ids and mounted file systems. This work was started by engineers at Google ...| Dan Stroot · Blog
One of the challenges in a large distributed enterprise is "finding stuff". Sure we call it collaboration, knowledge management, or any number of other sophisticated terms but often it boils down to just finding stuff. To compensate the organization reacts by saving multiple copies and versions of a file in many different locations: email, shared file systems, intranets, etc. Of course this compounds the issue and drives the desire to save "my copy" to "somewhere where I can find it". This po...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Google’s IPv6 measurements crossed the 3% milestone just under five months from when the 2% milestone was crossed. Prior to that it had taken 11 months to go from 1% to 2%. This post IPv6 Gets Real first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
This morning I saw a post on LinkedIn by Bob Sutton who is a Stanford Professor and Co-author of Scaling up Excellence. He discusses Adobe's move to abolish it's employee stack ranking system. After the system was eliminated, one Adobe employee noted that a feeling of relief spread throughout the company because the old annual review system was “a soul-less and soul crushing exercise.” This post A Soul Crushing Exercise first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Today at the Open Compute Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that "In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.s This post Facebook Saves a BILLION Dollars via Open Compute Designs first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
You read that right: one billion. Not one million. Not one hundred million. Not five hundred million. One billion U.S. dollars. This post Billion Dollar March Madness Bracket first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I was reading up on the "MEAN" stack: Mongo, Express, Angular and Node and came across a blog post from [Francesca Krihely](http://francescak.me/blog/2013/04/09/fintech-hackathon-recap/) about the FinTech hackathon in NY from back in April, 2013. This interested me because as a former "insider" in a large financial services company I can see clearly how open source code and tooling is replacing more proprietry code and tooling (for example .net/visual studio) but it requires an entirely diffe...| Dan Stroot · Blog
This is a pretty amazing technology demonstration of what is possible using the currently available open source tooling, open source data, and using cloud service providers for hosting and content delivery. It was written by Cameron Beccario (@cambecc). Check it out below. This post Supercomputer Weather Visualization in a Browser first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
I have heard some people speak of "mobile-first" and "responsive design" interchangeably making them sound as if they were one and the same. However I think there are some subtle differences. I believe responsive design is the broadest possible definition. It says to me that we are going to target all platforms, screen sizes, pixel densities, etc. It means that the user experience will be custom tailored to the exact device you just happen to be viewing it with. This should be our ultimate go...| Dan Stroot · Blog
Asymco has done a fascinating piece of research mapping technology adoption curves, technology refresh rates, and human lifespan, to predict technology lifetime ownership. "...knowing how what innovations become universal and the speed at which these technologies are replaced can give us an idea of what individuals might experience in their lifetimes." This post Technology Adoption Curves vs. Birth Year and Life Expectancy first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Apple’s most recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows the company has budgeted $11 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2014. This is more than 5 times Apple's capital expenditure in 2010 and 57 percent more than the $7 billion it spent in 2013. What is Apple planning to do with all that additional money? This post Apple's Astounding Capital Expenditures first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
As a CIO in a large, publicly owned financial services company I held the responsibility of keeping our clients (and our corporate) data safe and secure. As the economics of cloud services became compelling the largest hurdle to adoption was "potential security risks", by a large measure. This post Intrinsic Bias first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks, and you're putting in 100-hour workweeks, then, even if you're doing the same thing, you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve. This post Work Like Hell first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
If you watch someone run the 100 meters, they sneak glances around. Sprinters watch each other while they run. They want to know where are in the pack. I noticed that only Usain Bolt looks at the clock. Why? This post Only Usain Bolt Looks at the Clock first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Many large organizations work exceptionally hard minimize "risk". Ironically, by working so diligently to reduce risk they are paying for it anyway, and reducing innovation at the same time. This post Risk Mitigation Costs Too Much first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The United Arab Emirates holds the largest biometric database in the world, the Emirates Identity Authority has announced. The population register of Emirates ID has over **103 million digital fingerprints and over 15 million digital facial recognition records**, which includes multiple records of each UAE resident, and digital signatures as of October 11, 2012, senior officials said. This post Minority Report and Big Data first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the TEDx Orange County conference where the theme was relevance. Specifically how do you stay relevant in today’s world? As the day progressed this theme blossomed for me. I took away a number of new ideas and perspectives. I learned things from people whom I expected to learn things from but also from unexpected places, which quite frankly is the best kind of serendipity. This post TEDx Orange Coast 2012 first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Like many people in the Technology world I watched Apple's iPad announcement this week with intense interest. Unlike most people I am interested not in the consumer space - but rather how could this device be used for business. How could a new category like this be used? This post Apple Reaches for Greatness Without Apology first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
In the article I compared what I was doing with Dropbox as a potential corporate version of iCloud. It turns out there was a LOT more there than meets the eye. Dropbox may even have **become** iCloud had some things gone a bit differently. This post The Corporate iCloud, part 2 first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Apple’s announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote will have far reaching effects. Much has already been written about the impacts to you and me as consumers of Apple products. But let’s stop and think for a moment about how this will affect our perceptions about technology, and how that will translate into the corporate IT space. This post The Corporate iCloud first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
Like many people in the Technology world I watched Apple's iPad announcement this week with intense interest. Unlike most people I am interested not in the consumer space - but rather how could this device be used for business. How could a new category like this be used? This post iPad Goes Corporate first appeared on Dan Stroot's Blog| Dan Stroot · Blog
The Red Cross, via a company called mGive, has got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross via a simple SMS text message. This led to an "unprecedented mobile response," and has raised over $10 million in relief for Haiti. With text donations peaking at a rate of 10,000 a minute, at $10 per donation, this is raising $100,000 per minute!| www.danstroot.com
Charlie Munger has been Warren Buffet’s partner since he joined Berkshire Hathaway as a vice chairman in 1978. In 1995 Charlie gave a speech at Harvard University about human decision-making and factors contributing to misjudgments. He wanted to share what he had observed and learned; models he used that helped him (and Berkshire Hathaway) succeed.| www.danstroot.com