Fixing the Broken

I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true.  It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though.  The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....

30 Mar 2019 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Managing Difficult Problems

I can no longer count the number of times that I've been able to re-invigorate a problem investigation, even if I have zero visibility on the actual problem.  This takes some self-discipline that doesn't come easy, especially during an urgent investigation. Here's that one weird trick:I do the depth of reading myself.  If I see multiple threads, I'll read all of them.  Then I will write as short a summary of all of the facts that I can....

9 Mar 2019 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Next Career Move

The company I work(ed) for has been planning a division sell-off for most of the year.  Weeks after that division spin-off into Private Equity, I was notified that my last day will be 29 October.  The last time I was laid-off, it was similarly driven by a corporate action.  Upper management had been talking about a flatter organization, and cutting out management levels, so I was well prepared mentally.  I actually expected that I would take it much worse than I did....

20 Oct 2018 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Tech/PC] VirtualBox, Windows 7 and a new CPU

As I've done from time to time, this blog serves as a bit of a bench-notes of what I did.  However, maybe someone else hits the same problem, and finds my blog via search. About a month back, the new nVidia 2080 Ti card was announced.  I decided to hit up eBay to see if anyone was selling off a 1080 Ti, and I was not disappointed in the price drops....

15 Sep 2018 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink