The Essence of Networking

In this post I talk about one of the books I read as part of my personal knowledge management.

The Essence of Networking is a Dutch book (“De essentie van netwerken”) about networking in the social, non-TCP/IP sense. It describes what networking is, how and why it works and gives practical tips on how to go about it. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder — I’ve re-connected with several old friends and coworkers since reading the book.

Online backup for Linux

Having just returned from a vacation with tons of new pictures I started thinking about properly backing up my data, something I haven’t been very diligent about in the past. Talking to a friend whose USB disk failed and the resulting loss of data made me take action.

Making agile the easy choice

Ever try to convince a manager to adopt an agile project approach and failed? That happened to me recently. A new manager came onto the project and pulled out his MS Project clone. “All we have to do is plug our deliverables and tasks into this program and I’ll be able to track the project’s progress.”, he said. I smiled at him and asked if he had heard of Scrum. When he said no I started explaining the methodology to him. After two sentences he stopped me and said “I’ve worked like that sometime ago in the 90s and it didn’t work then.” That, as far as he was concerned, was that.

Flawless Consulting

In this post I talk about one of the books I read as part of my personal knowledge management.

One of my colleagues read the book Flawless Consulting and was blown away by it. In his opinion, every consultant should read this book at least once. Usually, I’m skeptical when someone claims that everyone in the profession should read a particular book. Even though the book may be useful to the person making the statement, it is often because of a combination of time, place and work situation. Such conditions are unique to the person reading the book and do not easily transfer to someone else.

On the other hand, Flawless Consulting looked like a nice change of pace from my normal reading, so I put it on my book list. After having read the book I found myself repeating the statement my colleague made before: every consultant should read this book! In this post I’ll try to summarize why I think this is the case and what to me are the most important things I learned.

Installing Vodafone Mobile Connect on Fedora Linux

Sometimes, working at a large client organization presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, you’re there to do work for them, but on the other, their rules and regulations make it hard for you to do so.

At my current project, the company’s security policy does not allow anyone to put external computers on the network, preventing me and my development team from working on our laptops. The desktops that we can use are locked up so tightly (not to mention underpowered) that they can’t be used for development either. To fix this (and do nothing illegal) I asked my company for a Vodafone Mobile Connect USB modem and installed it on my Fedora Linux laptop.