The potential for physical money to be the vector for the virus has encouraged every capable society to shift towards card-based payment, preferably contactless at the point of sale. As a consequence I, like many other people, stopped using cash.
In fact, it has been about a year since I last used cash, and I’m getting to like it. One downside of this is that now all of my transactions are being tracked by someone. With the demise of cash comes the demise of privacy.
So now I predict that there will be a growing popular demand for a true digital cash technology, one that has all the convenience of traditional cash, the added benefits of personal accounting (not to [click title to read more…]
It’s natural to be a little lost when a familiar context is completely altered, as has happened to millions (!) of people around the world in the past few months as a result of this truly awful pandemic. Three weeks since the WHO’s declaration, there appears to be an abundance of “experts” offering advice on how to “work from home”.
I’m not a WFH expert, merely a practitioner with decades of experience and while this may seem like an opportunity for many people around the world to show just what can be achieved by a WFH workforce, it’s really not.
For one thing, in almost all cases there was no proper planning. A workforce that suddenly has to work [click title to read more…]
I’ve been a tech consultant for several years. Having come from a long history of CxO-level roles, head-of-this, chief-of-that, chair-of-the-other, I find myself, for the first time, alone. I still have busy days engaging with people, my inbox is as hectic as ever, the IM pings are continuous and my schedule isn’t pretty. Working in teams is something I miss but I’m fortunate that many of my most trusted colleagues have remained in touch. Travel is a thing of the past, thankfully (as it was becoming tedious). There’s nobody to whom I can delegate and nobody to whom I must report other than my clients.
During a recent meeting with some people at a government agency that is tasked with [click title to read more…]
My “day job” as a tech consultant brings me into contact with a lot of software companies, but occasionally I encounter an enterprise that is in the process of becoming a software company. This happens when the company determines that their traditional line of business not only needs to incorporate a software/online strategy, but actually needs to make this the new focus. Motivations range from survival in the face of tech-savvy competitors to expansion into a previously untapped market.
While I enjoy helping these companies explore technology options, it is equally rewarding to help them establish a development process, being a formal approach to the creation of their new products or services. The processes that we in the software world [click title to read more…]
Migrating MySQL from local servers to AWS RDS has its ups and downs…
Several of my clients, and a few of my own projects, have local instances of relational databases, usually MySQL (or MariaDB/Percona derivatives) and there is growing interest in moving these into the cloud. Amazon’s almost-drop-in replacement is the obvious candidate. You can find plenty of detailed information online about AWS RDS, typically addressing matters that concern large database installations. Maybe such matters sound more exciting than moving a small database that has probably been ticking away nicely on that small box in the corner for years. So what about the small scale cases? Most of my consultancy clients would be using single database instances with just a [click title to read more…]