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Today, we're breaking out something a little different. I put this together more for fun than anything else, and we piloted it around in the Side Bar, along with a few other shares.
After some feedback, we're happy to bring this to the front page, and we plan to produce more of videos in this vein as a recurring periodic feature.
Jane took a job at a big financials company. The pay and the benefits were the first draw, but she was really sucked in by the visions of building analytics and juggling billions of dollars with cutting edge data mangling techniques. “Big data” came up in the interview many times, along with “cloud”.
The first cold blast of reality was when she was given her developer desktop: a Windows XP box with 4GB of RAM and a CPU that could get lapped by the processor in a BlackBerry. “Oh, is this just a dumb terminal I use to connect to your cloud?” Jane asked.
It was the mid-nineties and the Iron Curtain in urban Kerblekistan had come crashing down. Everything was in turmoil, and people were trying to make up for all of the years lost behind the locked borders by trying everything with enthusiasm. The WWW was still in its infancy, but that didn't stop the budding entrepreneurs.
Enter a young whippersnapper, still in high school. Daddy hooked him up with a buddy of his at a certain state institution. Now don't go imagining secret agencies or ministries-of-defense; we're talking more like parks-and-recreation. Therein was a department that still had a nice chunk of unspent budget. In the sweet tradition of bureaucrats everywhere, they were looking to spend it and hopefully wind up with something to show for it.
While that was its original intent, Dick wound up selling the office managers on expanding its role to include reporting that would help them make budgetary decisions. It helped them determine which maintenance guys deserved a raise and which buildings needed renovations the most. So despite the maintenance department despising Q-Max because it made them do stuff, management loved every bit of it. Little did they know how precarious the system was on the backend.
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Dick focused on keeping this amazing application running, and let the company's "Disaster Recovery Team"- one guy named Pete- worry about the worst case scenarios. They kept a regular offsite backup of its data so that in case of something catastrophic like a meteor strike, Q-Max would not go the way of the dinosaurs. Their backup system was quite simple, yet had a necessary workaround step - Every night around midnight an Oracle backup was created on the database server. From there, they copied to an offsite tape backup. Due to infrastructure limitations- bandwidth and reliability, mostly- this mirroring process had to run to get the backup to a location the tape robot could get its iron clutches on.
"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O' Israel!"
Merriam-Webster says that synonyms of stupidity include boneheadedness, brainlessness, denseness, dim-wittednes, dumbness, mindlessness, senselessness, thickness, vacuity and witlessness (among others). Perhaps they should add management to the list.
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For some reason, managers tend to make leaps-of-faith in the realm of technology. If they think that they know the meanings of two words, then there must be a connection between those two words. Unfortunately, whether the connection is real or imagined, they seem to proceed as though it were always real.
As a Python developer, SEO was far outside of Ian’s toolbox, more in the realm of expensive social media consultants. However, when his friend Alec asked for help, he knew he couldn’t turn him down.
Alec worked at LightBarn, a lighting supply company, and was overseeing their SEO optimizations. Alec explained that no one could actually find the company’s website with relevant keywords on popular search engines. “I looked all the way to page 150!” Alec said. “I don’t get it. We have plenty of inbound links.” Alec had worked for months writing a blog on the company’s site, and his posts were routinely linked to by other industry sites.
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The year was 2004, and Scott S. has just begun his internship at IniBank: an underdog financial institution that would, over the years, grow up to be one of the biggest players on the market. Despite being fresh out of college with little experience under his belt, he quickly found his way around the corporate culture and acclimated to the Application Development Department.
Dec 15