monochrome rainbow

[mnchrmrainbow]

Be scared, and do it anyway. Be under-qualified, and get in the room anyway. Be messy, imperfect, and unsure and show up anyway. Comfort is the enemy of growth. Get uncomfortable.

Suneera Madhani - entrepreneur

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Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make.

Corita Kent - artist

Context is crucial in leadership. Each discipline has a different approach to reach the solution but there is always something we can learn from one another.

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Success is when opportunity meets the prepared.

Cheryl D. Miller - Graphic Designer

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Our language, our world

... Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt endorsed an element of linguistic determinism – that is, that language not only reflects a particular worldview but is actively involved in shaping it: ‘Language,’ he wrote , ‘is the forming organ of thought.’ The relationship he envisaged, however, was not one-way but dialectic. Between language and thought there inheres an endless feedback loop: our thoughts shape our words, and our words shape our thoughts. His account was not restricted to individual words – more important were the grammatical structures exhibited in the languages of the world. But even the study of grammar was only a preliminary to the real task, according to Humboldt. Grammar and vocabulary merely represent the ‘dead skeleton’ of a language. To capture its character, to see its ‘living structure’, we must appreciate its literature, the use made of the language by its most eloquent speakers and writers...

- by James McElvenny

- Edited by Sam Dresser published on aeon.co

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The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technolog

-DR. E. O. Wilson - Sociobiologist

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What you eat turns into your health. What you read turns into what you think. What you expect turns into your happiness. Who you spend time with turns into who you are.

Shane Parrish - Author

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The Profile Original: Former U.S. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson: ‘Know the Difference Between Advice and Command-Decision’

... I wanted to know: As a leader, how do you know when to ignore the advice of highly-qualified people around the table and to trust your own judgement? Wilson said something that will stay with me for a long time.

“You always have to know the difference between the advice and the command decision,” she says. “They are there to provide advice, not to decide.”

She adds: “There is no substitute for the decision-making by the people responsible for the outcome. It may have been the harder decision in the short-term because you are going to get grilled, you are going to get skewered the next day. But in the long-term, it was the right decision.”

...

source: https://theprofile.substack.com/p/heather-wilson-air-force-secretary?utm_medium=email

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MACH Architecture and Cloud Infrastructure: A Powerful Combination for a New Programme with PII Requirements

The Challenge: was to design and implement an appropriate infrastructure for a new programme with ambiguous specifications and no knowledge of the potential audience. This program aimed to support various global markets with different needs and preferences.

In software delivery, working on a greenfield project is a rare and challenging opportunity. It is exciting because we can design the system ground up without being constrained by the legacy and using business requirements to shape the system. However, it is also daunting because the scale and the boundaries of the project are unclear. 

One of the most complex requirements were around PII (Personally Identifiable Information).  The rules and the regulations for PII vary significantly among countries, which creates additional complexity and overhead in terms of business rules, implementation and infrastructure.

In addition to the challenges with requirements, being an Agile program, we anticipate many changes and adjustments as the product is used by the consumer. We will iterate and respond to the consumer feedback promptly.

The Solution: was to build a cloud-based application following MACH architecture. MACH is a modern approach to software development that stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.

Cloud infrastructure allowed us to scale up and down easily as needed. This flexibility was crucial, as we had no data on the required infrastructure for the project. Therefore, we started with minimal resources and let the system scale and evolve based on the data we collected. Moreover, we avoided the infrastructure cost when it was not necessary, and only paid for what we used. 

Thanks to cloud’s flexibility we could scale in isolation for each region if needed, making the system adaptable for each market. This feature was very beneficial within the context of PII, as we could create fully isolated regions within the same project. 

We chose AWS as our primary cloud provider and some parts of the system used Azure because of the business requirements. Fortunately with today’s technology, different cloud providers can work together within the same project.  

Akamai, which is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), created our ecosystem with strong security features. Security was very vital, as global reach came with global risks. Akamai’s AI powered and machine learning models protected our system from malicious bot detection to various attack vectors.

Being a small development team, we utilised automation where we could. Using infrastructure as code (IaC), we developed one-click environment creation from scratch, so that the product could be deployed anywhere AWS operates. This feature was especially useful in the context of PII, to comply with local regulations.

For one-click environment creations, we used Terraform with well-defined and documented roles and permissions. Terraform is a tool that allows teams to define and manage infrastructure as code. Terraform also helped us to track changes, and enabled collaboration within the team. As infrastructure was codified we avoided all the ambiguities of manual changes of the settings and configurations which helped us to troubleshoot quickly and efficiently when needed.

Following MACH architecture and utilising the latest cloud technology made this project possible with its small budget, tough timeline and limited resources.

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"If it costs you your peace it's too expensive."

Paulo Coelho - Writer

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...

Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way

...

Viktor Frankl | Man's Search for Meaning

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Assumptions by Richard Wiseman

Assumptions we should do all we can to avoid assumptions especially on software projects that are already very complex by nature.

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The conclusion is that non-creative behavior is learned

The Failure Of Success by George Land

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Victor Borge — William Tell Backwards

Can your mistakes be so good that it is still a product. Of course this is comedy but can't we learn from the witty Victor Borge?

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Delivering Global Solutions with Microservices, Cloud-Native APIs and Inner Source

The Challenge: High level requirements were to deliver a global digital voucher solution across various retail machines, consumer devices and regions.

However, there were additional requirements. We needed to support small regional marketing teams who needed a simple and flexible solution that they could easily use. Our small development team needed to provide operational support.

We also had to consider the non-functional requirements, such as usability, compatibility, security, and performance. 

Usability was a concern for both for internal users and customers. We wanted to create a user-friendly solution that would make it easy for customers to access and redeem their digital vouchers, without any confusion. Analytics and management of the digital vouchers were another concern as we also wanted to create a solution that would provide valuable insights and feedback to the marketeers. So that they could optimize their campaigns and increase their conversions.

The Solution: was to build a cloud-based microservices with clear and robust APIs following MACH architecture. MACH is a modern approach to software development that stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.

Microservices are small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs. This way, we could create, update, and deploy features faster and easier, without affecting the whole system. Building cloud-native APIs enabled us to scale, adapt, and reuse product components.

We chose AWS as our cloud provider. We benefited from its global infrastructure, which provided high network availability and ensured a performant solution across the globe. Using AWS cloud services, such as storage, database, and security, we reduced the overhead and maintenance costs of our solution and increased time to market.

Following an API-first approach, we created well-defined contracts for each API, so that dependent development teams can work in parallel to speed up the implementation timelines. This approach was beneficial internally too. We improved development maturity by enforcing coding procedures and defining benchmarks for performance and availability. We also followed Agile methodology, which allowed us to fail fast and learn from our mistakes. We iterated quickly and responded to the customer feedback swiftly.

In just over three months, we launched our first version to the US market. We were able to expand to the next market within a week. MACH architecture helped us to extend the solution further quickly and efficiently both with extended capabilities and brand new implementations as each cloud-based service was isolated and provided clear functionality.

We learned from each experience and shared the learnings. We used data analysis and user testing to improve our solution and meet the expectations of our customers. 

We also embraced the inner source, a software development approach that applies the principles and practices of open source to internal projects. Inner source helps us to collaborate and innovate with different teams and projects around the world.

This was a demanding project with tight deadlines and tough business constraints and was a remarkable achievement that required teamwork and coordination across borders and time zones.

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Will it break? by Dr. Tatiana Erukhimova

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Martin Reeves: Why play is essential for business

To thrive in today's competitive economy, you need to constantly reimagine your business. So what's the secret to sustained success? Strateg

Why play is essential for business by Martin Reeves