Irregularly-published views and reactions
Imagine that you are running your own business, or have a significant stake in one, and therefore take a keen interest in helping to ensure its long-term wellbeing, both for you and for others … 4 min read
ThePrimeagen interviewed Robert Martin (“Uncle Bob”) , one of the signatories of the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” (often simply referred to as the “Agile manifesto”, obscuring its … 3 min read
One of our recent episodes of The Puzzle Podcast with Bruno Pešec strayed off the beaten path somewhat, by exploring various use cases that I have found matching and respecting the current … 3 min read
Announcing my new side-project and first non-fiction, technical #book: a practical tutorial of working with databases using Elixir and its Ecto database layer. Those of us who were around in the 90s … 3 min read
Making progress with Changelogrex , the “Linux kernel Changelog king”! Today I figured out how to get LiveComponents within a LiveView to update by using PubSub, the send_update function within a … 3 min read
The website oee.com portrays OEE, the “Overall Equipment Effectiveness”, as “the gold standard for measuring manufacturing productivity” [sic]. OEE is a number between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%) that … 14 min read
Ollamex v0.2.0 has been released, now with support for the /embeddings API endpoint of ollama version 0.1.20 for generating embeddings using self-hosted LLMs (Large Language Models). The /chat, … 2 min read
For a few months now I have been using ollama to self-host LLMs (Large Language Models) on my development server and to occassionally utilize the ollama chat interface. The real motivation of … 2 min read
JTBD and ODI have together been instrumental within 2023 in diving deep into a business domain I had zero prior experience in. Judging from my validation rounds earlier this year, and the continued … 5 min read
When did autarky fall out of fashion? Perhaps when cheap (zero-interest) money started raining from the heavens, thus making every choice in favor of depending upon numerous third parties for critical … 1 min read
With the help of ChatGPT 3.5, the documentation of Elixir/Phoenix, and lots of IO.inspect and trial-and-error, I finally figured out the basics of how a Phoenix LiveComponent works in combination with … 2 min read
For our upcoming SaaS launch we’ll be relying on the free, open-source, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager listmonk . However… there was no Greek translation of the UI; that is, until a … 1 min read
The tightest, most documented process that brings a tear to the eye of an obsessive-compulsive, detail-oriented manager… The most “agile” process with whatever elaborate rituals some caste of … 1 min read
As the end of the year approaches and a review of this year of TECTRA Ltd’s performance becomes possible, it’s great to see that the various operational improvements of the past 4 years seem to … 3 min read
Nothing good ever came from separating “the brains” from “the hands” in an organization, and in product development endeavors in particular. But it doesn’t stop there, at the fallacy of considering … 2 min read
Any idea or instrument (or both) for organizing work, when taken to extremes (the larger the org, the more likely) is a distraction from getting the actual work done, and (in my experience) often used … 3 min read
Coding is so approachable and accessible nowadays, that you don’t need to be a full-time software developer to compose something that creates value. It’s been a bit longer than one year (months before … 3 min read
“Lo, as X became more mainstream, so had its mentions taken on an increasingly memetic quality. X became a symbol of conformity to the capital’s bidding, a means to legitimize all sorts of … 1 min read
Blunt and genuine questions to everyone who find themselves caught in a circus of “X transformation”: Why are you, as someone making a living out of doing something valuable in/through/with an … 1 min read
Jamstack is a fantastic software-architectural approach for certain use cases, and with very low complexity. I enter all my data into Strapi CMS hosted in a FreeBSD jail and accessible at … 1 min read
A pretty nice set of combined boundary conditions is to develop the bare minimum that: gets the job done at the target quality (i.e. fulfills requirements), and minimizes opportunity cost / cost of … 2 min read
Dear Mozilla , Because your organization is out of touch with reality and the actual users of your software, you are either entirely unaware of the confusion and wasted effort resulting from the … 1 min read
“Somehow, every generation […], even within the same organization has to relearn how to do strategy… and the same thing is happening with innovation…” – Bruno Pešec It’s true. And all that fervent … 2 min read
“Failure”, “success”, other labels…. Within 250 years, latest, nobody will even know 99.99999% of people ever existed, of their opinions, experiences, “successes”, or “failures”. Have you noticed that … 1 min read
I wish that there would be something for managing Linux containers that is as simple and elegant as BastilleBSD for managing FreeBSD jails. If there is, please let me know (I don’t mean something like … 2 min read
Garage is an open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting, and is available on FreeBSD . Up until recently, the installed package did not provide an rc.d script, so I wrote … 1 min read
Basic use Filter chain: Remove the black regions after using cropdetect that identifies the right filter as crop=1280:352:0:184 Split the stream into two streams, one for the left and one for the … 1 min read
At TECTRA Ltd we’ve been using Dropbox for some years to share “view links” for product documentation with customers. I’ve been managing our files library with Maestral on Linux Maestral and sometimes … 2 min read
I upgraded a server from Debian 11 to 12, which comes standard with Python 3.11, under which this happens: Fails to build on Python 3.11 - longintrepr.h: No such file or directory Cue learning about … 1 min read
“There is a fear and shame [in organizations] of saying ‘I don’t know’.” – Bruno Pešec When attempting to innovate, “I don’t know” in nothing to worry about or be ashamed of; the question is, what … 1 min read
ZFS is cool and everything, and obviously the filesystem of choice on FreeBSD, but there is (at least? only?) one feature that Linux BTRFS has that ZFS doesn’t: out-of-band (“offline”) deduplication. … 1 min read
“Innovation capabilities are just like working out; it’s a bunch of muscles.” – Bruno Pešec You don’t simply step in a gym for the first time and bench-press your body weight. Plus, not everyone has … 1 min read
I have been rewriting the API of TECTRA Ltd’s system for Product Data Management from Python to Elixir, as an exercise in learning Elixir, and Phoenix and GenServer in particular. In the currently … 1 min read
Note Edit: since this post was written, I have released my Elixir reimplementation of python-greeklish as Greeklix . I’m reimplementing python-greeklish in Elixir and, unlike the original python … 1 min read
I just updated “The Incredible Story of Deft” with the new foreword by J. Scott Perry . Many thanks, Scott! Scott’s enduring interest in the book is what spurred me to publish the revised and expanded … 2 min read
The evident vision with Meta’s Threads is to capitalize on Twitter shooting its own foot now that the usage of its API has been curtailed; to short-circuit the already-failing invite-only Bluesky; and … 1 min read
This is an ode to the URL design of Leanpub , one of the few SaaS for which I am happy to have paid a lifetime subscription. What comes after https://leanpub.com/ ? Let’s say I’m writing/publishing a … 1 min read
Nowadays, any X we want to hang responsibility of onto a single person (sometimes merely to tick a box and not suffer FOMO or embarrassment of being behind the times, for optics’ sake), becomes a … 2 min read
Someone recently posted an Excel function to poll the Google Translate API and return translated text using LET(), WEBSERVICE() and TEXTSPLIT(). LibreOffice Calc does not provide LET() or TEXTSPLIT(), … 1 min read
Public Service Announcement: cool down your NVMe drives! Especially if they are installed in “Tiny Form Factor” PCs (aka “1 liter” cases). How do I know? From own experience resulting from a lack of … 2 min read
Dave Snowden (of Cynefin fame) recently made the following post on LinkedIn: Look, I know, I know… Who am I to question the Dave Snowden? But hear me out. I am not so sure about the use of the word … 3 min read
One of the best products I’ve ever bought. ASRock Inc. really hit it out of the park with this one. Powerful, power-efficient, and with plenty of connectivity options. An effective and efficient … 1 min read
Work on the 2nd edition of “The Incredible Story of Deft” continues… on every evening, and every weekend. What’s different to the first, print-on-demand edition of 2017? There’s a story now with … 2 min read
One day, premium brands will realize that less-polished videos like the one below can be far more persuasive than the typical big-budget, ultra-polished, brand-conforming, self-important video. (Most … 2 min read
In Ancient Greek mythology, there exists a timeless tale that offers us valuable insights into the pitfalls that can befall companies and their executive teams: the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Its … 3 min read
It boggles the mind that there is still no motherboard with a bunch of ARM big.LITTLE CPUs and plenty of cores that can also handle SATA. Consumers are still locked into mini-ITX mobos, at best, … 1 min read
Earlier this year, there were posts on LinkedIn bemoaning the “low supply of people skilled at using LLMs”. But how skilled do you have to be, anyway? It’s not like using LLMs is the same as learning … 2 min read
The following is an excerpt from the fateful meeting between the protagonist Nathaniel Lee Abel, the champion of X, and Polymal, in Lo and Behold, X! : “𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥 ‘𝘐 𝘥𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸?’ 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙡𝙮 𝘥𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 … 2 min read
What’s the problem with making the role of an “Agile coach” the essence of your professional identity? The problem with making the role of an “Agile coach” the essence of your professional identity is … 2 min read
NocoDB v0.81.1 running non-stop for 313 days straight on an Alpine Linux 3.14 VM, serving as the Product Data Management back-end (with auto-generated REST API) of TECTRA Ltd. “Boring” and reliable … 1 min read
This cringeworthy business meme keeps popping up on my LinkedIn feed every so many months, and it never fails to infuriate and disappoint me with the utter lack of critical thinking of those who … 1 min read
I let the topic analysis feature of Discussit run over the copywriting of an upcoming new GPR product for concrete scanning. (As I told John Davenport yesterday, competitive marketing analysis is IMO … 2 min read
I just had a demo of Discussit by John Davenport . John fed it my article on product-focused innovation with IoT. Discussit generated a list of topics in the outline, and explanatory text for each … 1 min read
I recently attended the 10th anniversary reunion of my IMD MBA Class of 2013 in Lausanne, and part of that even was also a discussion panel on various topics. The request to “tell us what you do” is a … 2 min read
People often post OECD stats about working hours on LinkedIn, and then you get nonsense arguments like “ooooh look how hard Greeks work!”, “look at the powerhouse of Germany!”, etc. Think harder. What … 3 min read
“Belief in science.” An expression much beloved, IME primarily by: those who have no clue what the scientific method implies for blind trust in models/authority, and those who either ⠀⠀2a. genuinely … 3 min read
“One in five Greeks illegally accesses sports content. According to the 2023 report of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), Greece ranks second in EU, in terms of illegal access … 2 min read
Some mornings I wonder… Am I too jaded about Agile, Scrum, and so on? Am I too dismissive towards peddlers of miracle cures to tricky problems of coordination, collaboration, prediction, disagreement, … 2 min read
Here’s an update of my Elixir library for retrieving company information from the Greek government’s RgWsPublic2 SOAP API that deprecated the v1 SOAP API 10 days ago. Version 0.7.0 is cleaner, gets … 2 min read
Opinion: SAFe will not go anywhere anytime soon. Those running it are very smart marketers. It will keep growing and embracing more and more stuff into version 7.0, 8.0, etc., until its monstrous … 2 min read
Wasted money can somehow always be made back again. People’s time is by definition a scarce, finite, non-renewable resource. Therefore, wasting people’s time is the biggest insult and injury. And, by … 1 min read
My opinion is that SAFe has a cunning multi-sided business model. On the one side, managers who don’t understand agility, relish the feeling (illusion) of control, and, not knowing any better, look … 2 min read
Note Since this was first posted, the book “Lo and Behold, X!” , a business fable of change and intrigue, has been published. Verily, if thou hast found delight in my discourse on Deft , dripp’d with … 2 min read
The IT infrastructure of TECTRA Ltd is proudly what I call “potato-powered”. And by that, I mean that it has always been frugal, measured yet effective, but even more so since the early 2000s, when we … 3 min read
I do wonder though where all this perfunctory “Linux requires tinkering” thing I keep reading comes from. I’ve been running Debian stable/testing/derivatives on everything, such as a QNAP TS-210 NAS … 3 min read
Excerpt from the upcoming book “Lo and Behold, X!” , a business fable of change and intrigue. Instead of “X”, think “Lean”, “Agile”, and any other set of ideas that business and consultants make a big … 2 min read
“The rise of the chief AI officer” Aaaaand we finally reach the stage of the Chief X Officer for X = “AI” – though, this came way, WAY faster than anticipated. Note that despite the “job description”, … 2 min read
IMO the first obvious benefit of Generative AI is the ability to generate lots of variants with way-beyond-good-enough quality and with lots of variety, and at practically zero cost. This has … 1 min read
So much acrimony between proponents of Agile This or Agile That in the battle for mindshare and market share! I can see the merit of the argument that the popularity of a framework implies value for … 3 min read
First, there was a seemingly-magical new thing called X, a set of ideas that someone came up with, or put together, out of their own practical experience within an organization. Soon afterwards, in … 3 min read
Have you noticed that most problems that come to bite us in the posterior are caused by a short-term focus that prevents systems thinking? Many say it’s “human hubris”; nonsense. It’s that many … 1 min read
In January I decided to make 2023 my “year of Elixir”; that is, I’m parking coding new things in Python for a while, and will be focusing on learning this exciting functional programming language … 2 min read
Another week, another Elixir package – my “Year of Elixir” continues! Identicons are useful as placeholders, such as for profile pictures. One other use of identicons I have found over the past few … 1 min read
It has been a productive weekend full of learning Elixir, and my first-ever serious Elixir project is now open-source under the Apache-2.0 license. VatchexGreece is an Elixir library to easily pull … 1 min read
Product-management pro tip: don’t use one or more of your product’s key specifications as part of the model name. Doing so reduces your product to the spec value. If you are the one defining the … 4 min read
People are posting about the World Happiness Report 2023 (based on 2022 data). It gets interesting when you get the raw data from the report’s website and compare it to the World Bank’s most recent … 2 min read
Following my earlier post on summarizing a YouTube video with ChatGPT , I put together a gist that uses the yt-dlp and openai Python modules to either download a proper transcript or extract the … 1 min read
I’ve been learning Elixir and some things, like the pipe operator |> instantly clicked. And then I remembered Reverse Polish Notation, which I extensively used on HP48G while at ETH Zurich, and still … 2 min read
Here’s how to summarize any YouTube video with a transcript for free using ChatGPT without paying for the Summarize browser extension. The “Summarize” extension for Google Chrome uses ChatGPT to … 2 min read
Come on, everyone associated with “the Agile movement” and with SAFe in particular: admit that SAFe is the same type of silver-bullet management BS that Six Sigma used to be, and move on to perform … 1 min read
John Crickett recently posed this question on Linkedin. Here’s my answer: Python 3 with asyncinotify watching a LibreOffice ODS spreadsheet for modifications, upon which it re-parses the spreadsheet … 1 min read
I used to optimize turbocharger turbines for a living for a while, at ABB Turbo Systems (now Accelleron Industries), with PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and NSGA II, libFANN models, clustering … 2 min read
I provided one of my various articles to ChatGPT, and asked it to identify the 5 key takewayas, and the situations in which each article could you helpful for product managers. Let’s look at what … 1 min read
Traditional product management, more akin to “farming”, is truly useless in the early stages of a product-focused venture, and especially before achieving the highly-sought-after Product-Market Fit … 1 min read
Linking physical objects with online data that is always up to date is actual creation and delivery of value to customers. I did something like this at TECTRA Ltd, though not for equipment, but for … 2 min read
After 11 weeks of self-paced learning, I completed Stanford Online’s Coursera course on “Organizational Analysis” . Here’s my review. The models I like the idea of using various models as lenses … 2 min read
Every now and then I see posts on my LinkedIn feed from Lean practitioners who have become infatuated with Japanese culture and language, glorifying (actually great) figures such as Ohno and Shingo, … 1 min read
When you talk about your product, you have a limited time span to bring your points across. Hopefully those points are related to value propositions that address the customer’s Jobs To Be Done . … 2 min read
In the product portfolio of a typical mature and typically successful brand you are likely to find one or a few products that I call “The Walking Dead”. These products may have become increasingly … 2 min read
Yesterday I had a call with the founders of NocoDB, to meet, greet and discuss our use of self-hosted NocoDB as the beginning and foundation of TECTRA Ltd’s digitalization journey around 1.5 years … 2 min read
There is no silver bullet in terms of an ideal working model for product development. However, there are countless working models that are universally bad, no matter the context. You have to build one … 2 min read
Six months, six new microservices/APIs at TECTRA Ltd , a company that I am a Managing Director of, that enable us to increase responsiveness and consistency by a) making access to decision-making … 2 min read
I just finished a fascinating chapter in Stanford University’s online course on “Organizational Analysis” , with “Tech” being a pseudonym behind an unknown Silicon Valley company. However, the … 2 min read
This is a response to Soumen Sarkar’s response to my comment and a follow-up to “The prevalence of methodological kabuki theaters” . After Agile comes Bagile, Cagile, and so on… Agile frameworks do … 1 min read
It all becomes Kabuki theater when an entire company decides to “go Agile”. This also demonstrates a deep lack of awareness on behalf of a company’s management when “going Agile” with big tralala … 2 min read
Sometime between 2009 and 2019… Isaak: Based on my review of the situation, here’s an issue I’ve identified, here’s what we could do and here’s a list of potential outcomes and recommendations for … 2 min read
Now and then, posts on LinkedIn surface that discuss the potential of finally establishing “Lean” within an organization by creating a Project Management Organization (a “PMO”) that only runs “Lean … 2 min read
Poka-yoke in issuing a new sales item number: the in-house microservice for Master Data Management of TECTRA Ltd’s product portfolio finds the existing sales item number N with the … 1 min read
Some of us have been saying for years what the website “The SAFe Delusion” so nicely portrays: SAFe Agile sells so well to economic buyers within corporate environments exactly because it takes the … 2 min read
In 2010 I was training ANNs using libFANN and my own implementation of “early stopping”, then building ensembles of them. I was also using various clustering and regression algorithms to predict the … 1 min read
This image popped up on my LinkedIn feed, on an insightful post by Jeroen Kraaijenbrink that argues that strong leaders are also needed, perhaps even more, in some situations. I agree. One problem is … 1 min read
In this comment thread on LinkedIn , someone asks where all the cool engineering projects have gone. Are the best engineers really working on ads? No. Here are three examples of awesome engineering … 2 min read
It would be great if some of the energy that goes into NFT and crypto would be / have been invested by international bodies (e.g., the European Union) into creating a blockchain-based system for … 2 min read
Have you noticed the recent LinkedIn trend of people using their past affiliation with well-known employers as their headline? With this mindset, I am Isaak Tsalicoglou, “ex-Proceq, ex-Hilti, ex-ABB”. … 2 min read
Product Management / Head of PM / VP PM / SVP PM / CPO are techno-commercial roles. Business acumen is a must-have, not a nice-to-have alongside technology/product understanding and industry … 1 min read
Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose: the trifecta of intrinsic motivation; and yet, so often entirely ignored. Often, those managing change initiatives spend a lot of effort on communicating the purpose—if … 2 min read
Discipline where necessary, slack whenever needed. The smart thing is to know where/when to apply what and to what extent. Because discipline is not something that can be relied upon, I much prefer … 1 min read
The 80% setpoint is inspired by the waiting time of a specific type of queue (credit to Don Reinertsen for this graph, which is my favorite!) It might not be the “one correct” setpoint, but it’s … 1 min read
A friend recently asked me how long it would take to develop a physical product. My answer: way less than you think; if you do the right things the right way with the right people. Except of course … 2 min read
Website traffic on https://tectra.gr before and after the revamp of our TECTRA Ltd website 😀 Discoverability remains a key issue for SMEs dealing in a highly technical and industrial subject matter. … 1 min read
I saw one of those inspirational posts recently: “Lean is about developing and transforming people, not just about process improvement”. Noble sentiment, but much like the title of the seminal HBR … 1 min read
Good question! I wouldn’t say that every tech company sucks at marketing. Many do, even if they aren’t in tech. When it comes to tech companies though, most suffer from terrible marketing because they … 2 min read
IMD , my second alma mater, recently announced this year’s annual OWP program (“Orchestrating Winning Performance”) with the following cringe-worthy hook: We live in an age of intense disruption & … 2 min read
The year is 2020. The marketing behind NDT (non-destructive testing) products, both for hardware and for software, continues to be either: predominantly specs-focused and jargon-heavy, and with little … 1 min read
For years, some abuse “Lean” as in claiming to run a “lean supply chain”, emphasizing JIT to reduce capital tied in inventory to the minimum. In fair weather, many of those have gotten recognition and … 1 min read
Today I read “Western Digital admits 2TB-6TB WD Red NAS drives use shingled magnetic recording” . I am one of those who were fooled by Western Digital… A while ago I equipped a server with 2 units of … 2 min read
This is a response to this unbelievably hot take on LinkedIn. When you work with data, it’s to be expected that you also might think that making decisions and acting upon them must be solely based on … 1 min read
If a product doesn’t stand out in ways that matter to its users, its buyers, or the beneficiaries of its use, it doesn’t need to exist alongside all other ones in the category (or its alternatives). … 1 min read
Most traffic on our office network relates to a set of the most frequently and recently accessed 10 GB of files (at most) out of a total of ~200 GB on a RAID1 array of slow-yet-reliable 2-TB hard … 1 min read
“Windows 10 could start bullying people into using a Microsoft account to install” My firewalled and pi-holed virtual machines with Windows XP or 7 and Office say hi. It’s funny how technology giants … 1 min read
Sean Driscoll facetiously asks : Should we use just one improvement method for everything? I can’t really tip-toe around the fact that Lean isn’t an “improvement method” or a framework. Maybe striving … 1 min read
This is a reaction to a LinkedIn post that inquired about calculating the Takt Time for infrequently executed business processes, such as S&OP. I’d say reducing lead time is more important for … 2 min read
The mystery of the incumbent organization: it is often owned by capitalism-minded “feudal lords”, who wish to achieve a monopoly or oligopoly that lasts as long as possible thanks to a) regulation … 1 min read
As someone who wants to focus on my actual business instead of on chasing after exciting and time-wasting features and bugs I want to be positively bored by the IT choices I make. Somewhat-outdated … 1 min read
One problem with product development as an endeavor is that the vast majority of those engaged in it have never understood that it’s all about: making conscious trade-offs, minimizing compromises, and … 1 min read
People nowadays hear the world “technology” and imagine all kinds of digital tralala. We mechanical engineers know better. As an example, take the traditional and venerable concept of a slide valve … 1 min read
Marketing material in which past employees feature as models using the products are quite eerie if employee turnover has been really, really high. “This guy’s not there anymore… Neither is this guy… … 1 min read
In 2013 and in particular in 2018 and 2019 I spent many, many hours creating various models (in Excel, sometimes also with Simulacion 4.0 ) in order to estimate total market size and competitor size … 2 min read
Gated content is an unnecessary hurdle; it prevents those interested in the content from easy access, and puts those few left on a rollercoaster of anticipation that pretty much always ends in … 1 min read
Which options spring to mind when you think of buying a laptop for business purposes? For many people, who don’t know better, the main option is to trek to the nearest electronics store and select … 5 min read
When we apply Lean Manufacturing ideas of standardising work on other functions, where work is more vague and creative, we are starting a slow drift towards a transactional, low-trust, controlling … 3 min read
As a development engineer at ABB Turbo Systems [edit, in 2023: now Accelleron Industries], I developed complex mechanical components (e.g., radial turbines, shafts, casings, threaded connectors) using … 4 min read
