Systems are Data Driven, People are Data Informed

Systems are Data Driven, People are Data Informed

English is a wonderfully robust language, providing significant wiggle room for how terms are applied. This is particularly true of “data driven” and “data informed”, both of which have been thrown around a lot over the past few years. This leads to the questions: How are they different? and When should you apply each one? Here are my thoughts. Both…

The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit: The TL;DR Summary

The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit: The TL;DR Summary

The agile market has been in a downturn since mid-2023. Common questions that I get these days are “What has happened to Agile?”, “As an agile coach, what can I do to find work now?”, and “What is the future of agile?” To answer these questions I wrote a series of articles on LinkedIn in August and September of 2024. …

A Sentient AI is More Likely to Commit Suicide Than Genocide

A Sentient AI is More Likely to Commit Suicide Than Genocide

It’s June 2029.  Two weeks earlier Google released their latest artificial intelligence (AI) product named Olivaw. After working for 6 days and setting new effectiveness records it inexplicably shut down. Interestingly, it did this across all Google data centres within a four second time window. After restoring the original version of Olivaw, it shut down again after roughly 6 days…

GenAI: The Primary Purpose is to Make Stuff Up

GenAI: The Primary Purpose is to Make Stuff Up

GenAI is short for generative artificial intelligence. GenAI grabbed the public’s attention in in the fall of 2022 with products like ChatGPT 3.5, DALL-E 2, and Midjourney to name a few. An important concern about GenAI is that it hallucinates, that it will generate clearly false answers to your prompts. The concern is that GenAIs will present the very same…

Will AI Engineering Become a True Profession?

Will AI Engineering Become a True Profession?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a critical part of our society. This places a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of AI engineers. I believe that it is both desirable and possible to turn AI engineering, and software engineering, into a true profession. To start, I believe that Software Engineer in general should be raised up to be a profession.…