Categories
other tools

Audacity

Use Audacity to record WAV files for your IVR.

Categories
decisions other process

Micronumerosity

Small sample sizes reduce precision of estimation. Try to acquire more data but avoid simply adding “more of the same” as obtaining lots of small samples from the same population will not help. Applied more broadly: seek different opinions to avoid confirmation bias.

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other program

MaxMind

Google Experiments don’t support serving geography-driven landing pages. MaxMind free API allows you to query user’s IP address and determine user’s ISP location.

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other work

1 year

The devs, test, suppprt, PMs are most important in the next 60 seconds. Because they are in the front line. Not you.

However over a year, CTO is important since the decisions you make as the CTO will impact ability of the IT org to respond to market changes, competative threats and new regulation.

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other process work

60 seconds

As the CTO you are not important in the next 60 seconds. Dev fixing bugs, writing a line of code, support helping a user, PM holding a project meeting are all more important than you.

It’s hard to stay humble when everyone laughs at your jokes. But you are probbaly least important person in the IT organisation in the next 60 seconds.

Categories
other system telephony

Telephony Cont’d

How do you create a high-volume telephony solution with database lookup IVR in another country in 2 weeks?

Use Colt as primary and Sonetel as backup.

Categories
other process program system

Decisions

How do you make tech decisions? How do you make them under under pressure? In a stressful project situations? When a deadline is approaching and dev delivery is late?

Develop a set of standards that relate to domains (data architecture, solution design, versoning, dependency management…). When you are faced with a decision think about how it relates to your standards which will help you make better decisions faster and also it will make you aware when you compromised and added to you tech debt – your legacy elephant that you need to drag with you.

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other work

CoolTech

… we used to go to work to play with cool technology. Now we have cool technology at home and legacy tech at work.

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other trading

EURCHF1.1999

A trough back to my trading platform days…

What happened was truly a black swan as I can assume algo after algo saw their EURCHF 1.1999 stops hit, and moments thereafter the EURCHF pair crashed to less then 0.75, margining out virtually every single long EURCHF position, before finally rebounding to a level just above 1.00, which is where it was trading just before the Swiss National Bank instituted the currency floor over three years ago.

Over two decades ago, George Soros took on the Bank of England, and won. The SNB took on virtually every single macro hedge fund, the vast majority of which were short the Swiss Franc and crushed them…

Central Banks 1 : Hedge Funds 1

Categories
design other program

Pretotyping

Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money.

Cheaply test your thinking “build it, and they will come.” Learn from it as fast as possible. Think 1 PowerPoint slide, single page website, $100 AdWords campaign, product packiging/logo… search Pretotyping for examples.

I think of pretotyping as minimum-viable MPV ie MVMVP. Does sound like an acronym hell but you what I mean.