Mistakes

January 2026

• 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.22 MIN8.8k

December 2025

• Dec 29, 2025TechnologyRecognizing Common Security BreachesEquifax had the Apache Struts patch for CVE-2017-5638 available two months before its breach began, and the flaw sat unpatched for 143 days until discovery while attackers took data on 147 million Americans. The 2024 Verizon DBIR, built on over 30,000 incidents, keeps finding the same short list behind most breaches: credentials, unpatched vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, social engineering, insiders and compromised suppliers.24 MIN21.4k
• Dec 23, 2025TechnologyCommon Analytics Mistakes and Their ImplicationsHewlett-Packard found employees living far from headquarters quit more in their first year, strongly and significantly, and changed recruiting to favor nearby candidates. The confound was compensation: those campuses paid below local market, so staff both commuted from cheaper suburbs and left for better-paying competitors. Proximity had nothing to do with it. Correlation misleads through confounding, reverse causation, and spurious matches that are inevitable at scale.25 MIN44.4k

October 2025

• Oct 13, 2025Work SkillsWriting Mistakes ExplainedEdward Tufte told the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 that the critical foam strike risk sat three bullet levels deep in a NASA slide, with the wide confidence interval stripped out by the format rather than by dishonesty. The seven failure patterns that follow, from writer-order structure and unexplained jargon to over-hedging and missing calls to action, each come with the fix and the test for spotting it in your own draft.23 MIN32.1k