Pacemakers and Negotiation

Tony

I first met Tony, our new VP, shortly after he joined the company. He’d already heard a lot of us software team leads complaining to each other constantly. If you've been with any company whose management doesn't understand software development, you know the perennial issues that frustrated us on a daily basis: old hardware; accumulated technical debt; overly aggressive, often arbitrary deadlines with far too little testing... the typical problems that non-technical management tends to be uninterested in addressing. Tony didn't claim to be unusually tech savvy, but he genuinely wanted to make things better. So he called a meeting to learn the details.

Lies Your Physics Teachers Told You

Originally posted on Quora in response to the question What are some high school physics misconceptions?

Here are two misconceptions that persist far beyond high school. They surprise even physicists and engineers!

Attach a ball to a bungee cord and swing it in a horizontal circle over your head. What path will the ball take if you release the cord?

We’ve all been taught that it will continue in a straight line^* tangent to the circle. That’s wrong!

How We Worked Before the Internet, and What We Can Learn From It

Originally posted January 17, 2021 

Back in the ’80s, when we cooked popcorn and reheated coffee on the stove, and when “let’s go to the videotape!” actually involved videotape, we already had both private and public networks. We had external media, long- and short-term storage, and even L1 caches. It was glorious.

A Document that's Older than Most of my Coworkers