Are You Missing O’Reilly Too?

June 15, 2020 Gear Sales Engineers No Comments
Today would have been the start of O’Reilly’s Infrastructure & Ops Conference 2020 in Santa Clara, California.   For those of you not familiar with the Infrastructure & Ops Conference, it was the rebranding of their Velocity Conferences.  I’ve worked booths at 5 Velocity Conferences during my time at Compuware and…

6 Tips for Big Screen Real Estate on a Budget

May 30, 2020 Gear No Comments
It has been decades since I started using Xinerama to get multiple screens on my workstation.  This was a big part of my effectiveness as an architect and full stack development at Garage City.  One screen for my IDE (Integrated Development Environment), one for the log outputs and a third…

Is LinkedIn Diluting Education?

May 20, 2020 Getting Hired No Comments
When creating a profile on LinkedIn there are three places where you can enter your education.  “Adding” a “certificate” to your profile is too easy.  This dilutes education and how it is categorized.  The way LinkedIn has integrated Lynda.com is the cause. And if they have integrated these “certificates” into…

Do you have enough UMI to protect Blue Shield?

April 29, 2020 Attitude No Comments
Under-insured Motorist Insurance, or UMI, is important to have.  And it also is inexpensive, since the odds are low you’ll ever use it.  Basic economics there.  Are you aware that if you are in an accident, your health insurance might step in and demand half of any settlement?  That it…

Authentication? Authorization? What’s the diff?

February 12, 2020 High Level Tech Intro No Comments
Early on in security courses one of the key lessons is around authentication, authorization and access control.  The first two are fairly straight forward.  They then roll into the last of the concepts – access control which I’ll cover last. Authentication Authentication is verifying that you are who you claim…

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…