Regex and Performance

January 15, 2020 High Level Tech Intro No Comments
Compute power costs money.  This is one reason why it is important that developers write their regular expressions (regex) with efficiency in mind.  It also needs to be written correct so that it functions explicitly as intended.  I was using a SaaS tool to simulate the performance impacts of certain…

Care and Feeding of a Sales Engineer

December 9, 2019 Attitude Sales Engineers No Comments
Sales Reps and Sales Engineers often come from very different personality types. The rep is responsible for finding the leads, frequently getting told “no” multiple times before finally getting a meeting setup. They handle the relationship building, negotiations and keeping things on track. (Yes, SEs build relationships, but it isn’t…

The Best Conference Demo

November 27, 2019 Sales Engineers 1 Comment
There are three ways that firms create and/or maintain the environment(s) used to provide demos at tech conferences.  Each has their tradeoffs, and you must weigh them to find which is right for your company. Each for His/Her Own The most common I’ve seen since 2010 is that each SE…

The Foundational Learnings from a Serial Cable

October 31, 2019 Attitude Startups No Comments
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. Will Durant   I find it interesting that people will put more energy into questioning the reason for foundational learning then they put into immersing themselves in the lesson itself.  That lack of prioritizing energies lessen the odds that the knowledge…

Liars and Statistics . . . or Perhaps Accounting?

August 19, 2019 Startups No Comments
Early on I learned the quote that “Statistics never lie, but liars use statistics!”  Over the years I’ve gotten to see some SLAs that sure sounded good but would be impossible to ever breach.  There also are plenty of companies that use statistics to make performance sound so much  better…

But What Kind of Demo Can YOU Give?

June 28, 2019 Sales Engineers No Comments
Sales Engineers need to give demos for almost all products or solutions that are technical to any level.  The problem is that there is no standard to define what constitutes a demo.  A naive VP might be satisfied with seeing a single integration as proof that you can do a…