January 2026
- Jan 11, 2026TechnologyAutomation Design Principles for Reliable WorkflowsMost automation failures are not wrong business logic. They are missing error handling, absent monitoring, or design so opaque nobody can diagnose it. This covers the seven principles that prevent that: simplicity, defensive design, observability, error handling, maintainability, testability and efficiency, with the five error patterns worth memorizing and the seven anti-patterns that produce fragile workflows.
- Jan 10, 2026TechnologyAvoiding Common Automation Mistakes and PitfallsThe failure patterns that matter, which are rarely technical. Automation amplifies whatever it runs, so a process that is slow because of unnecessary steps becomes a faster version of the same flawed design. The diagnostic question is what this process would look like if it were perfect, which often points to redesign rather than automation. Knight Capital's 2012 collapse combined untested code, no anomaly monitoring and no kill switch.
December 2025
- Dec 25, 2025TechnologySecure System Design Principles for Enhanced SecurityJerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder published eight design principles at MIT in 1975, and nearly fifty years on they remain the foundation, because the underlying challenge has not changed. Secure systems resist attack through how they are structured, not what is bolted on afterward: a castle with walls and a moat beats a house with an alarm. Target's 2013 breach reached payment systems through an HVAC vendor, which network segmentation would have contained.
- Dec 23, 2025TechnologyWhy Analysts Spend 80% of Their Time Cleaning Bad DataThe six dimensions data quality is judged on, accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity and uniqueness, plus the detection techniques and prevention strategies that catch defects before they reach a dashboard or a model. The sharpest case is Public Health England in October 2020: test results compiled in the older .xls format hit the 65,536-row ceiling, so roughly 15,841 confirmed cases were dropped with no error message at all.
- Dec 19, 2025TechnologyBest Practices for Effective Data VisualizationPosition along a common scale won, then length, then angle, then area, with color saturation and volume worst, which is why bar charts beat pie charts and why 3D effects and bubble sizes mislead. Their 1984 paper is the reason these rules exist rather than being matters of taste. The page covers Tufte's data-ink ratio, direct labeling over legends, sequential and diverging color, and how truncated axes and dual axes distort what readers conclude.
- Dec 14, 2025TechnologyCode Quality: What Makes Good Code?Knight Capital's 2012 deployment went to seven of eight production servers. The eighth still held dormant test code from years earlier, and the new release reused an old activation flag that re-triggered it. Erroneous trades ran for 45 minutes and cost $440 million, more than the company's net worth. This page covers correctness, readability, maintainability and performance, with Boehm's documented cost-per-phase pattern.
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