I took the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment recently. Thirty four themes, ranked one to thirty four, the whole thing. Now the sensible person opens the report, reads the top five, feels quietly wonderful about themselves, and gets on with their day. I did not do the sensible thing. I opened a chat instead and said: before I tell you anything, you rank all thirty four for me. In order. With reasoning for each. ...
Best conversation I had all month happened in the ten minutes after a school meeting, standing around, the way the good ones usually do. My son’s maths teacher was showing me what the class is working through at the moment, and the topic on the screen was vector coordinates. Points in space, described by numbers. Year 8 stuff. I could not help myself. I said, do you know this is more or less how the whole of modern AI works? Every word, every image, every sentence you have ever typed into ChatGPT gets turned into exactly this, a list of coordinates. Just not two of them or three. Thousands. Meaning becomes a direction in a space with more dimensions than you can picture, and similar things end up pointing the same way. Your Year 8 class is doing the toy version of the thing that ate the technology industry. ...
I sit on a school board, which means I am occasionally asked what children should be learning, and I have been giving an answer I no longer believe. The answer was: learn to code. Learn the technical thing, because the technical thing is where the leverage is. I have said this at dinner tables, to nephews, to parents who wanted reassurance, and I said it with real confidence because for twenty five years it was simply true. It was true for me. ...
The usual version of the abundance story goes like this. AI gets good. Companies build robots. The robots are expensive and narrow at first, so only the big players can afford them, and those players pull further ahead while everybody else has a difficult decade. Then, at some point, the robots start building robots. Curve goes vertical. Everything gets cheap. Prices fall, not because money became scarce but because supply became absurd, and we all sit around trying to work out what to do with ourselves. ...
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has long been about the big picture—vision, strategy, and ensuring the technology landscape doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own complexity. Agile, on the other hand, is all about delivering value fast, embracing change, and avoiding big upfront designs. When these two worlds meet… sparks fly. Agile vs EA — The Friendly (Mostly) Tension From Agile’s perspective: “Why are we waiting for an architecture review when customers want this feature yesterday?” “We value working software over comprehensive documentation… remember?” From EA’s perspective: ...