Eric Burns Online — Page 13 of 14 — My Virtual Take on Tech

So You Get the Need for Performance – but How Do You Improve It?

There are some eyeopening metrics out there about the correlation between performance and revenue. It has been 12 years since Amazon published their research that 100ms of delay cost them 1% in sales. And in 2013 Intuit published how each second of improved load time from 15 down to 7…

SE – Conference Booth Duty Is Your Friend

June 7, 2018 Sales Engineers No Comments

One of the responsibilities of a Sales Engineer is booth duty at various conferences. I must have 2 or 3 dozen badges hanging on the wall in my office from the past 7 years. Yes, there are some badges in there for Sales Kickoffs and other events, but the bulk…

Hiring? PagerDuty Knows How To Do It

June 4, 2018 Hiring Process Sales Engineers No Comments

So I’m a few months into my search for a new role and of course have had a few hiccups along the way. When I joined Compuware/Dynatrace I didn’t know what a Sales Engineer (or even APM) was, and it was a life changing experience. As for Fastly, CDNs sounded…

SE Candidate, the Technical Exercise Should Be Your Friend – Part II

May 29, 2018 Hiring Process Sales Engineers No Comments

It’s been two months since I wrote Part I on how the technical exercise, if done correctly, is good for all parties involved. During those two months I’ve had an opportunity to do several more exercises plus a handful of “technical” interviews. I’ve gotten to see some impressive ones as…

Collaboratively Improving Collaboration – or the Simple Genius of Slack’s Block Kit Builder

May 25, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

This week I attended Slack’s Spec conference. They showed off some new features and one of them was brilliant in the simplicity of the UI. It allowed the beauty of Slack to be self-perpetuating in a powerful way. I am sure there was a lot of development work and thought…

The Ease of Making Your Site Faster on Fastly (an Amazing CDN)

May 17, 2018 CDNs High Level Tech Intro No Comments

Performance is king. Despite that I’ve got this blog on some pretty ancient under-powered equipment. The first server was a 10 year old HP desktop with 2 gigs of RAM sitting in my garage. The new one is pretty old too, although a bit more powerful. That being said I…

Android Emulation, Hybrid Mobile Apps and the Demo

April 23, 2018 High Level Tech Intro No Comments

The last deal I helped win at Dynatrace before their first RIF was when I created a demo that provided all the visibility and power that a normal PoC (Proof of Concept) would have done – but integrated our UEM into the customer’s own mobile app. With any complex and/or…

Chatbots and . . . Umm . . . errors.

April 18, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

Last week I attended a MeetUp about Conversational UI. Ofer Ronen of Chatbase had some interesting slides on how to catalog errors for chatbots. And I’d argue that this way of categorizing issues can make your team more efficient as they work to improve your chatbots. When people do context switching…

Using Messaging To Reduce MTTR (ChatOps To Fix Things Faster!)

April 13, 2018 Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

If you aren’t using Messaging for your teams that diagnose and repair system issues you seriously need to rethink your methodology. Having worked as a Sales Engineer since late in 2010 I have gotten to see a lot of business models that depend on IT to deliver either a service…

Job Candidate – Don’t Make The Mistakes I Made

April 4, 2018 Hiring Process No Comments

I recently have spent over two months working through the process for a job I really wanted. During that journey I’d made mistakes that I feel are worth sharing. Hopefully you can take these lessons to heart. If you are ever in a similar position you won’t repeat them.