Musings on IT and programming

There is no harder reality check that trying to use a mass marketed product you developed and finding it's hard edges for your particular necessities at a different point. Also it is really hard to get off your builder hat when it is not even in your turf to add those capabilites to the development roadmap of said product. It is impressive how many small and micro enterprises work with sub optimal solutions or the bare minimum functionallity and end up exporting information and doing the extra work on spreadsheets. It might look like small things but those are actual needs of a group of customers that are not being met; and I get the other side of the picture, there is no way that a product team can provide solutions for those needs while being constrained on resources and juggling with the needs of the high utilization volume users. This post I'm trying to be vague but for some examples here are somethings I'm currently missing. * In a cash payment to be able to record ret...

 What a wild ride these past few years have been! I've bounced from IC to staff engineer to principal and even director-level management where I was setting long-term strategy. Then came the layoff plot twist, which led me to launch two non-tech businesses before circling back to being an IC again—but this time in Operations and DevOps instead of programming. This shift has given me fresh perspective on what actually works and where effort gets wasted. The contrast between deep-pocketed organizations and bootstrapped startups is striking. One group is carefully carving out their niche while the other is in pure survival mode. What's fascinating (and frustrating) is seeing how much bureaucracy and inefficiency exists, especially for micro-enterprises. These smallest businesses often rely on pen-and-paper systems or basic spreadsheets—stuck with manual processes because there simply aren't tailored tools for their needs. It seems nobody's interested in serving the smalle...