My blog is now on Substack

I’ve decided to move my blog to Substack. It’s just a nicer platform for writing and distributing content. Check it out here: joereis.substack.com This site will change soon, and I’m unsure what will happen to the old articles here. Stay tuned.

My 2020 Christmas Letter To My Kids

I email my kids – their “future selves” – quite often. Since 2020 was such a clusterf*ck, I sent them a long email about Christmas. I also figured that other people – parents or not – may want to read my views on Christmas, so here they are. Christmas email to my kids, circa 2020 … [Read more…]

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…]

Should you get a tech certification? It depends.

Are IT certifications a waste of time? An article about the worthlessness of IT certifications recently made the rounds on the front page of Hacker News. The author dismissed the validity of Java certifications, equating them to Hamburger University diplomas. While I disagree with the author’s view, I’ve also heard – and said – various … [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…]