Eric Burns Online — Page 6 of 13 — My Virtual Take on Tech

Last Day at Fastly

June 25, 2021 Attitude Startups No Comments

After a second 2 year tour as a Sales Engineer at Fastly, I am sad to announce that today is my last day. When Fastly invited me back, I was injured and looking for a safe place to confirm my recovery. Looking back, the amount of gratitude I feel to…

One Technology Missing from the Next Place To Be List

June 7, 2021 High Level Tech Intro SE Skills No Comments

Just before the New Year I published a short post about the next technology skills that will be big when it comes to employment. Recently I’m realizing there is one missing that I’d also suggest watching. That technology is Block Chain, or easier to understand by the name of Distributed…

Branding and Your Bot

May 28, 2021 Attitude Conversational AI High Level Tech Intro Message/Chat/Collaboration No Comments

Hungry, hours into a long drive, you scan each off ramp looking for a good place to eat. Think of two fast food logos. One that “will do” and one that “always hits the spot.” How do you feel seeing on the horizon the one that is just okay? How…

Raspberry Pi – Teaching Electronics + Programming in Large Virtual Events Part 2

May 13, 2021 High Level Tech Intro Raspberry Pi Startups No Comments

In Part 1 I covered a key overview of the additional items that can be used to do an interactive event where the participants get to work with both electronics and code on a Raspberry Pi. It needed to be firtst since there are so many options and many pitfalls. …

Feedback? You Need To ____(Verb) _(Adverb) _____(Adjective).

April 29, 2021 Attitude No Comments

Giving feedback can be challenging. If you think it is easy, odds are there is much room for improvement in how you go about it. Especially if you don’t see improvements or change after doling out your thoughts. The ultimate goal is to have impact on someone’s actions. The ultimate…

Raspberry Pi – Teaching Electronics + Programming in Large Virtual Events Part 1

April 23, 2021 High Level Tech Intro Raspberry Pi Startups No Comments

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded in 2009 to teach basic computer science. Inexpensive, standardized and versatile. If you are going to leverage them to teach electronics in a larger setting, especially virtual events, there are some best practices that will reduce friction, allow you to teach larger groups and…

No, I Don’t Want to “Put time on (your) calendar”

March 27, 2021 Attitude SE Skills No Comments

Growing or evolving companies will undoubtedly have undocumented and non-standard processes. Teams often share these processes as tribal knowledge of sorts. The key issue with this methodology is that they aren’t shared consistently and deviations will appear over time. This also doesn’t scale well. It is a sign of inexperienced…

How to Include a Raspberry Pi in a Remote Demo – Part 2

March 20, 2021 High Level Tech Intro Raspberry Pi No Comments

A few posts back I had an article on How to Include a Raspberry Pi in a Remote Demo. We just did another virtual event leveraging Raspberry Pis with more than 3 dozen attendees. and I’ve discovered a few more tricks I’d like to share. A minor one was the…

Slackware, Still Very Much Alive

February 28, 2021 High Level Tech Intro No Comments

A recent article at tecmint.com says that there are over 600 Linux distros (distributions). Of those 500 are in active development. If you aren’t familiar, a “distro” is a way of packaging up the Linux kernel with a set of applications. Different ones have evolved with different priorities and methodologies.…

When a 2% Increase in Cache Hit Rate Can Save You 20% in Data Center Costs

February 19, 2021 Analytics CDNs High Level Tech Intro No Comments

One of the key differences with Fastly is the ability to Cache the Uncacheable. You can programmatically purging content so fast that we even have customers caching API read calls. The cache holds onto content longer rather than passing to origin on “uncacheable” content. When the data changes, your system…