James Warrick

Software development estimates are often a major point of contention and misunderstanding. These problems are almost always rooted in participants having different language, expectations, and assumptions about the process. How many times have you seen something like the following?

Stakeholder: “When will that feature be done?”

Developer: “What do you mean? I finished that code last week.”

Stakeholder: “Uhhh… Nobody told me. Thanks! I’ll let our client know it’s ready.”

Developer: “Oh, well it’s not deployed yet so you’ll need to wait until that happens before you tell them they can use it”.

Stakeholder: “…”

There are multiple communication problems evident in this example, capped by the fact that neither party has the same idea of what it means for a feature to be “done”. It’s not that either party has the wrong definition, they just haven’t communicated well enough to understand each other.

Continue reading “Collaborative Software Development Estimates” →

I’ve been intrigued over the years watching various machine learning techniques steadily progress. Unsurprisingly, some of the advancements that are most apparent are around artificial image generation.

For a long time, Google and others would release videos and blog posts showing what they were working on, and us mere mortals would watch in awe from a distance. Then DALL-E came along with a public beta, and the general public got an accessible tool for anyone able to pay the reasonable fees associated. Since it can take several tries to generate the image you are looking for with these systems, it’s definitely not a cost-free system to use.

The next iteration in machine-generated imagery is here now, arriving as Stable Diffusion by Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/blog/stable_diffusion). This is a pre-built, freely available model where all the hard and expensive work of training is done. Anybody with a modern, gaming-ready graphics card who is comfortable running a few commands in the terminal can get it up and running.

As tends to happen with useful open software, a community has already cropped up around this tool. The community has made Stable Diffusion easier to use, and has adapted it to multiple hardware platforms. Support was recently added for the Apple M1 chip and its integrated GPU, so I had to give it a try.

My verdict after 2 days of using it: I can’t remember the last time I have had this much fun!

Continue reading “Playing with Stable Diffusion” →

Full stack developers are highly sought after in the software engineering world, for good reason. Being able to build a user-facing application while simultaneously keeping APIs, business logic, and databases working together is a valuable and hard to find set of skills.

Equally valuable is the full stack designer. You may not have met one or even heard of them, but they exist and they bring tremendous value to an organization.

A full stack engineer is as comfortable writing a complex SQL query as they are using the Chrome debugger, and a full stack designer knows how to architect the ideal user experience and go beyond the mockup to implement it as an actual user interface.

Continue reading “The Full Stack Designer” →

Choosing a technology can be a difficult, stressful, time-consuming process. It’s easy to find yourself in complete analysis paralysis, spending tons of time and money ensuring that your decision is the correct one.

Let’s say you need to choose a database for your new system. Just about every application ever built uses a database, so no matter what you are building this is hardly untrod territory. That means it should be easy to find somebody who has built an application like yours, right? You just need to read their blog about why they picked the tech, mirror their choice, and voila!

Continue reading “How we choose technologies at Corso” →

When I worked in the US Department of Defense, our computer systems had password requirements that were the stuff of legend. 3 lowercase letters, 3 uppercase letters, 3 numbers, 4 special characters, and they had to be at least 16 characters long. Plus they had to change every 30 days, and couldn’t be one of the last 25 passwords used. Because these were the requirements for our primary system logins, there was no chance of using a password manager.

So how did people handle this? Everyone diligently memorized the new password every thirty days, thankful that there were policies keeping everything secure, right?

Of course not!

Everybody kept their password on a sticky note stuck to their monitor where it could be viewed by anybody walking past. And the technical people who understood the risks of their password getting compromised? Well, they took a more sophisticated approach like tucking the sticky note in a desk drawer where it would take at least 30 seconds for someone else to find.

Continue reading “Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad password policies” →

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) famously has 344 single points of failure – meaning that there are 344 individual things that could go wrong, any one of which would render the entire $9.7 billion space telescope a failure.

Building a piece of equipment like the JWST is pretty different from building businesses or software systems. Learning about how the space telescope was built and operated made me think a lot about resiliency though, and whether there is anything that a typical business can learn from NASA’s approach.

When you talk to business people or engineers about resiliency, they usually focus on achieving that resiliency through redundancy. If we can build this incredible space telescope without having each part be fully redundant, is there anything that can be applied in our approach to resiliency with the software and business systems we build and manage?

Continue reading “Lessons on resiliency from the James Webb Space Telescope” →

I’m excited to announce that I’m part of Corso, a company dedicated to providing high-impact solutions to e-commerce merchants and their customers. Our immediate focus is to provide a service that solves problems with packages that become lost, stolen, or damaged during the shipping process, and to improve the environmental impact of orders being fulfilled into the hands of their customers.

My new adventure represents a big change for me since this is my first time working in the fast-paced world of e-commerce. I’ve enjoyed building and managing high-performance customer service teams in the past, and I’ve spent considerable time designing and implementing industry-leading technical solutions for those teams. Although e-commerce is new for me, the focus on providing an excellent customer experience through better technology solutions remains the same.

There are a lot of different reasons why I am excited about this opportunity. In no particular order, I wanted to share with you some of the things I look forward to doing:

Continue reading “Why I have joined Corso” →