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Quality Series Part One: The Challenge of Customer Experience with Continuous Deployment

A good customer is a disgruntled customer. It’s these squeaky wheel customers who find value in their vendors’ enterprise software products, impatiently waiting for new features. The adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines enables ambitious companies to release production software rapidly – sometimes several times a day. Yesteryear’s customers anxiously awaiting new releases now benefit from obtaining hot-off-the-presses features. In an ironic twist, customers now complain about getting blindsided… Read More »Quality Series Part One: The Challenge of Customer Experience with Continuous Deployment

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Heavy-Duty Fleets and Sustainability:
Live for the future and Act in the Present

Gladstein, Neandross, & Associates’ State of Sustainable Fleets 2020 Report provides an exhaustive exposé of not just Battery Electric Vehicles, but the state of Hydrogen Fuel Cell, Natural Gas, and Propane trucks, all of which are looming large on the near-term horizon. The Sustainable Fleets Report paints a rosy picture of a sustainable future for heavy-duty trucking, but it also delineates the myriad obstacles to remove before realizing this green nirvana. Sustainable solutions are promising, but the next Diesel engines will continue to dominate for at least the next ten years. What’s a fleet to do in the meantime? Plenty!

Long-Haul Driver Shortages in the Big Brother Era:
5 Ways for Fleets to Stanch the Bleeding

Class 8 truck drivers are a graying breed. According to American Trucking Association’s (ATA) 2019 Truck Driver Shortage Analysis, the average age of long-haul truckers is 46 and the average age of private fleet drivers is 57. The combination of driver retirements and industry growth over this decade will exacerbate already-acute driver shortages and cause supply chain disruptions. The ATA study indicates the current long-haul driver shortage is around 60,000… Read More »Long-Haul Driver Shortages in the Big Brother Era:
5 Ways for Fleets to Stanch the Bleeding

3 Tech Company COVID-19 Silver Linings

Plenty of companies, like hammock makers and inflatable pool manufacturers, are reaping windfalls from the COVID-19 stay-at-home economy. For the vast majority of enterprises, however, their 2020 financial projections are upended and in jeopardy. Even companies that remain financially healthy are defensively crouching because of market uncertainty. Moratoriums on hiring, employee layoffs/furloughs, and salary reductions are the COVID-19 norm. Glass half-empty people see nothing but downside when strategic objectives fall… Read More »3 Tech Company COVID-19 Silver Linings

Deep Learning with Shallow Investment:
A DeepCortex Tutorial

Nowadays, a technology company without a data strategy is akin to a company not having a mobile plan five years ago – completely unacceptable. Around 2005, any company without “big data” was small potatoes. More recently, a company without [you name it]-as-a-service was woefully retrograde. Are technology companies a bunch of sheep that hew to the buzzwords du jour? Absolutely. Is it wise for a contemporary company to forgo a… Read More »Deep Learning with Shallow Investment:
A DeepCortex Tutorial

5 Takeaways From Building a No-Code Website

AI-juiced robots now trounce chess Grandmasters and wallop the best Go players. Robo-umps call balls and strikes more accurately than human umpires. Robots in modern manufacturing plants perform heavy lifting and repetitive tasks with a few supervisory humans on-hand. No-code platforms for websites have become so good, I wonder if computer programmers will eventually join the endangered species list. The following is a personal journey, not a definitive treatise on… Read More »5 Takeaways From Building a No-Code Website

Should We Demand Humanity from Our Autonomous Vehicles?

Like it or not, we’re on the cusp of self-driving cars. There’s still plenty to sort out from a liability and insurance perspective, but this is surmountable. The steeper challenge may come from wresting control of the steering wheel from the paws of us fallible humans. The public looks on aghast when a death occurs from an autonomous car crash that is a no-brainer for humans. When the Tesla on… Read More »Should We Demand Humanity from Our Autonomous Vehicles?

The Unpredictability of Covid Prophesyzing

Now that Vegas is reopened, bookies could start a new line of COVID-19 odds-making: Will business travel be forever reduced? Will sneeze-guarded supermarket salad bars become relics of the past? Will the French stop their double-cheek kissing? The bookies would give this last one long odds. Gallons of digital ink have been splashed prognosticating about the lasting effects of COVID-19. There’s nothing wrong with making predictions. If anything, a bit… Read More »The Unpredictability of Covid Prophesyzing

Digital Apps Will Not Save Us:
The Eminent Practicality of Basic Contact Tracing

Contact tracing has been used for decades to fight Tuberculous, Smallpox, Ebola, and STDs. Despite the vast success of contact tracing in eliminating the world’s most dangerous diseases, it has always been a delicate dance between public health and personal privacy. New smartphone technology for contact tracing raises the big-brother hackles of people who distrust the data practices of the big corporations building these apps. As stay-at-home restrictions in the… Read More »Digital Apps Will Not Save Us:
The Eminent Practicality of Basic Contact Tracing

Changing the Culture for Post-Corona Remote Work

Armchair prognosticators wax eloquent about the changes COVID-19 will bring to our future society. The absence of commutes, outside entertainment, and social events affords time aplenty for this sort of crystal balling. One of the most clichéd tropes is that employers who didn’t do so before Coronavirus will be forced to embrace remote work after witnessing how well we’ve functioned during our collective captivity. I call bullshit on this even… Read More »Changing the Culture for Post-Corona Remote Work