In a world where the time to market IT products is in constant conflict with quality, only 29% of IT implementations end up being a complete success, according to the Information Age. While most implementations will fail due to common errors, a good number of failure cases will arise from technical debt. In a nutshell, technical debt occurs when DevOps teams try to find … [Read more...]
Study resources for MCSA exam 70-697 Configuring Windows Devices
This Spring, I studied for, took, and passed the Microsoft Windows 8.1 MCSA certification exams. With Windows 10 announced and around the corner, Microsoft offered a promo - if you earned the Windows 8.1 MCSA before May 31st, 2015, you could take the Windows 10 MCSA exam for free. As part of the "Step up to Windows 10" offer, you must take the 70-697 exam by May 31st, 2016. … [Read more...]
Handling incidents, not blame
There's a great article from 2012 titled Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. It was written by John Allspaw, a SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy. The article tackles the topic of handling errors and incidents after they have happened. It's a great article and I recommend that everybody in IT read it because it has the power to change your team culture for the … [Read more...]
Should you really accelerate to a 2-year PC refresh cycle?
Intel promoted an industry analysts' report that calls the 3-4 year upgrade cycle of PCs a fallacy and pushes for a 2-year refresh cycle. The report "Replacing Enterprise PCs: The Fallacy of the 3-4 Year Replacement Cycle" (PDF) is compiled by J. Gold Associates, LLC and was reposted by Intel yesterday. My initial reaction is to state the obvious in defense: Of course Intel … [Read more...]
Microsoft SuperPreview and BrowserShots – Your website in different browsers
Due to the way Internet Explorer is integrated with the Windows operating system and just the restrictions Microsoft puts on it in the first place, you can only have one version of IE on a machine at a time. Of course, I've covered Tredosoft's Multiple IE solution before, which does allow you to have more than one version, but Microsoft has just released (in beta) a solution … [Read more...]