Tips for running a virtual meetup

The coronavirus pandemic has suddenly changed quite a few things with respect to meetups and how people network. Having helped run several popular tech meetups over the years, I’ve got a good handle on how to run physical meetups. We did our first virtual meetup – the Utah Data Engineering Meetup – on March 18th … [Read more…]

Networking From Home (NFH)

In the last few weeks, we’ve suddenly found ourselves in a brand new world. Some might rightfully call it a hellscape. In a matter of a few weeks, the economy went from blazing hot to an ice age. Last Friday, the US government carpet bombed the economy with $2.2 Trillion. The day before, 3.2 million … [Read more…]

Building A Pile Of Reputational Capital

What’s more important when starting a business? Making a pile of money quickly, or building a great reputation for the long haul? When we started Ternary Data in late 2018, we very quickly decided that while growing our revenues was vital, it was more important to grow our pile of reputational capital. It seems counter-intuitive, … [Read more…]

Dark Matter Companies

An old Scott Hanselman article about “dark matter developers” made the rounds on Hacker News this summer. Much like the dark matter that makes up much of the invisible universe, these developers are also largely invisible. As Scott said, “We call them Dark Matter Developers. They don’t read a lot of blogs, they never write … [Read more…]

2019 – New Year, New Habits

It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m sitting in my grandma’s house in Omaha. She’s a cute 88 year old lady who always inspires me to be a better version of myself. She never complains, and simply continues to take care of herself and focus on what she can change for the better. We’ve never … [Read more…]

Hello again :)

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted anything here. Truth be told, I’ve been hyper-focused on other things besides writing. Not writing is a bad habit though. Writing is critical, and something I’ll be doing a lot more of. So, hello again 🙂 So what’s been taking up my time? My last post about … [Read more…]

Perfect Handstands and Hard Projects

Shareholder letters are an opportunity for a CEO to explain their company’s place in the universe, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Twice a year, I drop everything and read shareholder letters from two of my favorite CEOs – Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. They’re not just great CEOs (they’re excellent). They’re also world … [Read more…]

Unfriending Facebook, AKA Derpbook

After over a decade on Facebook, I finally decided to unfriend Facebook. The recent revelations of Facebook’s latest fiasco with Cambridge Analytica (and likely hundreds or thousands of similar incidents) was the tipping point for me. Actions. Not words. Enough is enough. #deletefacebook pic.twitter.com/EaCnzlOWID — Joe Reis (@josephreis) March 21, 2018 For the last couple … [Read more…]

The AI Hype Cycle, Talent Wars, And Internet Comment Threads

Last week, somebody on Hacker News posted a link to a Bloomberg article titled “Sky-High Salaries Are the Weapons in the AI Talent War”. The article itself was good, and predictably discussed how the shortage of AI talent is driving up salaries. But what really stood out for me were the Hacker News comments on … [Read more…]

Use The Source – A Quick Tip For Re-Architecting With Legacy Data

One of my client engagements involves re-architecting the data and BI platforms for an 80 year old company. As you can imagine, there’s a ton of data across countless legacy systems. Data and systems have piled on top of each other over the decades. The vast majority of the data is undocumented, derived (hence, possibly … [Read more…]