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I’ve worked in several settings where technical people announced their focus was on the technology, not the user of the technology. They would say things like: “I don’t care what they do, I just want to build it.” This is a terrible way to work. It leads to bad solutions and miscommunication. You cannot find the flaws in the spec, and there are always flaws, if you cannot sanity check it yourself. You cannot know for sure your solution worked if you don’t know what the data means and how it is used. ...

LLMs are note designed to be consistent. So why would you hand off key business processes and expect them to be reliable?

The number of things in life that improve through practice is amazing. The list includes just about everything. When I give talks about the importance of communications skills for people who work in technology, I always take a few minutes to emphasis the value of practice. If you want to be a good communicator, you are going to have to practice on a regular basis. Why Practice Communications skills are use it or loss it skills: if you don’t do it on a regular basis, you will get worse. ...

If you haven’t been preparing for Salesforce’s upcoming security changes is your last call to avoid getting locked out! With instructions on the easiest ways to maintain access.

I am excited to be co-leading a new project focused on accessibility at the Salesforce Commons Community Sprint being held this August. Our working title is the Accessible Community Working Group. Since last fall I’ve been working with Salesforce’s Kelly Hamilton to review Trailhead content for accessibility. Our goal is to make sure the content goes beyond just passing formal WCAG requirements. We are trying to make sure it’s actually useful to the largest audience possible. ...

I have a new open source side project: High speed brain health games. The first release is ready for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s a series of games designed to drive you brain to work fast. The idea is to trigger implicit learning mechanisms in our brains. It appears this type of training can help reduce dementia risk (more on that research below). First the games. What are these Games? There are eight games including in the project. Each game is derived from a description I found with Gemini’s help of games used for brain speed research. Nothing I was able to distill from the research said which, if any, are better than others. It didn’t appear to be a question the researchers have tested yet. So I more or less built a version of everything I found (well Gemini found). ...

Is AI going to kill consulting? No. Will AI change consulting, particularly technical consulting? Of course. Will AI shrink consulting? Depends on economic growth and other factors. Having put a few stakes in the ground please give me a few minutes to defend them. Rumors of Consulting’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated. Ever since LLM-based AI became public, and people started to ask them questions, I have heard people saying AI will kill consulting. Often they make it sound like something that will happen next year, or even next week. I believe people who say this misunderstand of the purpose of consulting. ...

Several years ago I created a tool to help me estimate projects. It uses a Monte Carlo approach by taking your task list, estimated hours range, and your confidence in your own estimates. From those inputs it generates a series of possible outcomes to give you a sense of how long the project might take. Try my estimation tool. Quick History At the time I created it I was struggling with the accuracy of the estimates I was doing. I was either underestimating because of optimism bias, or over estimating because I offset my bias too much. ...

Lots of people working in technology have a choice between working for clients or working for consultants. We work on one side of the relationship thinking how nice it would be to have the advantages of being on the other; the preverbal grass is always seems greener. I spent a little more than ten years as a client before I became a consultant. I spent just a bit longer as a consultant before becoming a client again. There are things I’ve learned in each role that help me do the other better. To ensure a mutually beneficial engagement it is helpful to understand the perspective of the other team. ...

Accessible design is about people. Real, honest to God, human beings. They are our friends, neighbors, and even ourselves. This is not a technical article, about how to implement accessible designs. It’s about the thought process content creators should go through to make their content useful to as many people as possible. For those of us who don’t use assistive technologies on a regular basis, creating accessible content can be an abstract concept. We get tempted to focus on passing the scan, avoiding law suits, and generally treating accessibility as a checkbox. It is easy to forget that making your content accessible is about making it useful to people. ...