Acronyms, Collisions, and the Cost of Not Asking
I promised a follow-up to a post about tech vocabulary,[1] and this is it. That one argued that dramatic words and vague words fail the same way: they carry attitude where information should be. I…
The Blast Radius Was Four Rows
A while back I read an incident report that described the “blast radius” of a “catastrophic” data issue. I kept reading, looking for the part where something exploded. The actual damage: four rows in a…
Diplomacy Is a Feature, Not a Bug
I was reviewing some data export files the other day when a colleague flagged a problem. One of the rows in a CSV file was misaligned - columns shifted, extra fields appearing where they shouldn’t….