Posts in Category: tech

Curiosity and Luck

On July 13, 2020 by admin - Random, tech

Being at the right place at the right time. Opening the door even thought you are not sure what is on the other side.

  • Saying yes to Brad when he asked you to come onboard a new research group at the San Diego Super Computer Center (SDDC) investigating “what does the Internet looking like” (1997).
  • Saying yes to the Very High Speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) offer to come join the team (1999).
  • Calling an employer out of the blue and asking for a job interview even though they did not advertise any jobs (2005).
  • Saying YES to every Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson project. Getting exposed to mobile networks, PCRF, IPTV, Microwave Backhaul, carrier Ethernet and every communication technology that came up between 2005 and 2015.
  • Saying yes to Margaret Choisi’s invitation to join the third ETSI NFV meeting to provide input on “how do we test this stuff”.

Discoveries

On July 13, 2020 by admin - Random, tech

Sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you are really lucky. At some point during your very early years, dad walked into the apartment with what looked like a Singer sawing machine. It was not a sawing machine, but a computer. In fact, it was an Osborne-1. It was for sure a lot more mobile than the Control Data punch cards computers he spent his days with. And he brought it home. Best.Toy.Ever.

It must have been at some point between 1981 and 1983. Your memory is not exact on the year, but it does not matter. This was before you saved enough money for an Atari 800XL, that happy moment was 1985. But we digress, the Osborne-1 stood on the dinner table in the living room and was the coolest thing you ever saw. The keyboard opened from the bottom of the machine and it wad a tiny green screen. Way to get a pre-teen kid excited.

For some reason you think there was a game in there which was all the reason to learn how to operate the mobile computer. With rudimentary soap opera English at best and no typing skills yet loads of pre-teen time on your hands you still remember the excitement of getting the game to work (was it pong?) and the feeling of joy at figuring things out yourself.

Not much has changed. Building new things (teams, programs, products, solutions) and figuring things out, even the hard way, is, to this day, as exciting as getting that Osborne-1 to play a game.

Creating A Collaborative Culture

On July 10, 2020 by admin - tech

As teams grow in size, so do the artifacts that the team create. This year, slightly before the virus started spreading, and everyone was forced to work remotely, you experimented with the team in an attempt to increase collaboration.

Why?

  1. Accelerate time to results. The team was in the habit of shipping everything up to yours truly and then yours truly was expected to provide feedback. Mathematically, this is a loosing preposition. A team is built of more than one person and yours truly is exactly one person. So, by having all the material bubble up, you create a denial of service attack and the team was always waiting on feedback. Creating a collaborative culture, where a team member is encouraged to seek feedback from other peers and just review a document and provide input is a great way to increase the speed in which the organization operates.
  2. Build trust. Collaboration does not work when team members do not trust each other. The reverse is also true: collaboration helps build trust. Trust, in your peers, the system, the institutions, is a crucial element in safety and safety is the foundation of partnership. If one does not feel safe in the group, collaboration will suffer.
  3. Empowerment. In the corporate world, people hide information in order to gain the upper hand. To be, or at least feel, more powerful. If you know something that Suzanne does not know, you have more knowledge and therefore more power. That’s a great premise for a TV show, but this fails completely in the face of the path a corporation need to take to succeed: get in the same boat, row in the same direction, and reach the next landing shore. Imagine that the rower on the left has knowledge that the Eastern shore is the direction and the rower on the right does not have the same knowledge. How will we ever get to shore? Collaboration is empowerment. Even listening to new ideas, seeing a road map document and providing input, unsolicited, can only improve the product.

6 months into the experiment, the team is more collaborative, more open and way more productive. How did we get there?

  1. You responded to every email with attachment in the same way “sorry, I can not read this attachment. Please put it on our shared drive and send me a link.”
  2. Lead from the front. You created several directories, with names such as “Research” and “Road Map” and made them visible to everyone. You mark documents clearly as WIP (work in progress), but all the work is done in the open. So far, no corporate secrets leaked out and no one provided mean feedback. In fact, when asked “what’s the plan” you simply point to the document and state “here you go, look for yourself”
  3. Did Jack review it? Some habits are hard to kill so many folks still defaulted to sending material up the chain (this time as a link in an email). The way to enforce collaboration here was simple “did your colleague review it?” If the answer was no, you gently suggested that this should be done first and the rest was pure magic.
  4. You made all the files disappear to see how people respond. Well…lets say that the situation happened without you making it (everything was backed up of course), but the level of alarm the team showed was truly amazing to see. It was worth the small heart attack to realize that everyone had gotten so used to sharing files that no one had local copies anymore!

So now the team is much more collaborative. A recent launch worked so well, that 3 different folks contributed to the same partner quote sheet and were often fixing each other typos as the text was created – from three different continents. Another great example was a last minute preparation to an analyst briefing that included live editing of a deck which using a chat tool to agree on the content. The efficiency, trust and empowerment the team feels is a great testament to a collaborative culture.

Democratic Computing

On July 9, 2020 by admin - tech

In a world where the Edge of the network has plenty of compute cycles what is the purpose of the powerful CPU in your phone?

As 5G towers are coming up and the mobile network Edge is being fitted with servers, some of these servers with powerful GPUs and plenty of CPU cores, some even with SmartNICs, we can start thinking about shifting some of that heavy CPUs that are sitting in our pockets to other areas. Our smartphones suck battery charges, heat up (Galaxy 7 anyone?), are excessively complicated to maintain, and are inflexible. But what do we actually need while we are mobile?

Do we need a GPS? Probably not, the cell tower know where we are.

Do we need an Apple A14z chip? Probably not since we can shift all that heavy CPU work to the Edge.

Do we need storage? Why? Put your files in the cloud and ensure access at all times.

Do we need a good screen? Yes. And with it we need a display unit that is able to communicate with the network and render to our screen, but the heavy lifting could be done on the Edge.

In the near future we will be able to do away with the CPUs in our mobile phone, we can strip the phone down to its bare necessities: a Digital/Audio Codec (assuming we still use voice and hear music), display, networking stack and modem.

Once we embrace the Edge and 5G, we can democratize the mobile devices. We can bring down their price and make them available to any network that supports 5G and have an Edge story. This will mean that some companies, the likes of Apple, Google and Samsung, might have to go back to the days when they partnered with the network operator (remember the iPhone launch? AT&T only). That also mean that we could see a plethora of cheap devices with amazing capabilities. They will live on a 5G connection and will also be cheap enough to throw away once the battery runs out.

Democratic computing will finally connect the entire planet. Then, the computer will be the network and the network the computer.

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Positivity In The Time of Corona

On July 6, 2020 by admin - tech

For the majority of humans on plane earth, the last months have been challenging. Massive changes to our every day lives were forced on everyone in order to deal with a global pandemic. People are getting sick every day and the number of deaths at the time this is written is over 500,000. In order to keep one’s sanity, it is great to try and find the silver lining in the situation.

1. You get to have lunch every day with your spouse. How often do adults that work full time get to have lunch? Very rarely! But due to the virus, you and the misses are working from home which means that every day, at 12:00, you get to have lunch together.

2. You have not been jet lagged since March. Before the virus hit, you spent about 2 months being jet lagged this year and it looked like travel was going to be the theme for this year. This is the longest you have spent not being jet lagged since….2005?

3. You can ride your bike every weekend. Pre-SARS-CoV-19 you spent almost a weekend per month, if not more, traveling to or from somewhere. Often, these trips were back or from California which meant that you were in a pretty bad shape (see point 2 above) on the weekends. Since the lockdown started you are able to ride your bike every weekend. It’s truly amazing especially since the lockdown in Germany meant that one could still be sporty in public.

4. The air quality is great. Well…all that reduction in flying around the world is certainly looking to have a positive effect on our weather. The air is fantastic and nature seems to be having a really good year. If we can get some rain more often that will really be amazing (but not on the weekends please…see (3) for why).

Things will change, a vaccine will be found, and humanity will quickly forget what it was like to live under a global pandemic. However, not all memories will be negative. The list above will be a positive reminder.