Introduction

When I originally started in IT in the olden days, at the ripe old age of 19, everyone wanted older and more seasoned workers, which made it hard to get a foot in the door. As I aged and got experience across many industries and disciplines, the trend went downward in terms of what was desired for experience. Now it seems everyone wants a 20-year-old with the equivalent of 30 years of experience but isn’t interested in the 40–60-year-olds that have that experience. …

Introduction

I was lucky when I started out in IT and had a couple of exceptional managers that really understood their role as managers and how to grow a team. As I transitioned into leadership roles, those lessons served me well and I added to them. As those same years have rolled on, I find it harder and harder to find good leaders in organizations. They rule by fear or apathy, often employing the mushroom management principle and acting like spoiled children when difficult situations arise, resorting to statements like “do it because I’m the boss”. All of this doesn’t serve…

In the first quarter of 2020, I had the experience of being in a short term advisory role for a company that had built a type of Linkedin product for a specific vertical market. They had done a valiant job, but it was clear that scalability was a problem and they had created a problem for themselves by having used MongoDB as the datastore. The client knew this and wanted to do a rebuild using the neo4j, but despite its popularity, I am not a big fan of it as an implementation of a graph database for a variety of…

I’d been wanting to create a Roku channel for years but I was really put off at the idea of learning Brightscript so I just never did it until early in 2020 and I discovered the new Roku Direct Publisher functionality which lets you create a channel with relative ease and basically no programming. Granted, you aren’t going to be creating anything as robust as Netflix with Direct Publisher, but if you are looking to put your company on the Roku and not use one of those horrible 3rd party systems, this is a relatively easy way to do it…

As I write this on April 18, 2020, there are over 156,000 global deaths due to COVID-19, which is actually a tiny percent, however, this disease is incredibly communicable and is still not well understood.

I write this in mid-March 2020, in the midst of the US Presidential primary voting season prior to the presidential election coming in November. While about half of the states have voted, there is a lot of concern about the votes going forward, there is a series of primaries today and a battle between the Ohio governor and a judge in that state leaves that primary in a state of limbo at the time of this writing. So this presents problem #1, how do you maintain a voting system that requires personal interaction during a health crisis, but even ancillary…

As our lives are suddenly and drastically changed by the rapid spread of this virus, and my local stores are ignorantly devoid of toilet paper and vodka from panic buying, I reflected on a few societal changes we might see taking place. Let’s just jump straight into it with schooling since they just switched the entire University of California system to remote learning yesterday (at the time of this writing) and my wife is a school teacher at a high school that is likely going to do the same very shortly.

I’m going to approach the schooling issue from a…

How AI Search Can Change Healthcare

Though data management presents a challenge to most industries, technological advancements have been able to mitigate some of these challenges. Healthcare is also one of the industries that constantly adopts new ways to solve challenges. Trial and error in the clinical sphere proved that data accuracy, accessibility, storage, and retention must be approached with the utmost care. As part of healthcare ever-evolving data management challenges, technology has helped make information an easier aspect of the medical staff’s responsibilities.

Implementing technology on the data end of the process was difficult. Becoming acclimated to digitized records…