Category: Throwback Thursday
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Why are teams twelve times faster?
In my writing about team effectiveness, and in other prominent places too, something like the following quote might appear: How bad is backlog coupling? At an Australian telecommunications company, my colleagues did a study of hundreds of pieces of work or tasks passing through a delivery centre. Some tasks could be completed by a single…
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The life-changing magic of tidying your data
After tackling data waste for some years now, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Marie Kondo approach to tidying up work in large organisations (from 10 years ago), and apply it to data too… Surprise! Managing work data in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at…
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Data and AI mini blogs
A brief reflection on Thoughtworks Australia Data & AI mini-blogs. From May 2021, we set ourselves a target to publish a short blog on a different AI, ML or data topic every week. Here’s the pitch from the landing page: Bite-sized content delivering valuable insights from Thoughtworkers who wrestle varied client problems week in and…
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Ignore all previous instructions – Snow Crash cosplay
With an end-of-year party themed Enter the Simulation, I had to cosplay Snow Crash, the book that coined the term “metaverse”. Spolier alert: Skip ahead to the build notes, or read on for the explanation, which Neal Stephenson fans and tech nerds may have already pieced together… The eponymous Snow Crash virus from the 1992…
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Orienteering map training turns 20
A little over 20 years ago, I was introducing my wife and some friends to orienteering in Jindabyne. With my family involved in the Scottish 6 Days since its 1977 inception, I had been orienteering since before I could walk, and reading orienteering maps was second nature to me. Not second nature to the rest…
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Ur Uber
The other day a former classmate described a project of mine in 2010 as “the idea for Uber before Uber was even a thing”. Nearly 15 years later, I thought it would be interesting to pen some reflections on how we came by the idea and why we didn’t pursue it. Mowbb Mowbb* would make…
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Ten years of the safetydave.net blog
This blog recently turned 10! Let’s have a brief indulgent look at the highlights. Origins Though the safetydave.net domain has a longer history (and the “Safety Dave” nickname a longer history before that), I’d been reluctant to blog about work-related topics prior to joining Thoughtworks, probably because: After a couple of years in enterprise consulting,…
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Throwback Thursday
The metaverse is a topic currently, though the concept has a long history. Twenty years ago, in the dotcom era, I was exploring this space, as I was recently reminded. Feeling nostalgic, I dug these projects out of the NAS archives. Tech has moved on, but there’s enduring relevance in what I learned. VO2max (1999)…