Author: Derik Hammer
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Architects and Gardeners
There are two analogies for leaders that have made a visceral impact on my life and career, the architect leader and the gardening leader. These analogies became central to my personal and professional growth ever since I formally entered management five years ago. Arguably, I have been a leader for much longer than that in […]
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The immediate idealist
Any given business day you will find an age-old conflict brewing in a neutral-toned conference room or on a tiled video conference call. This conflict is the push and pulls of the idealists and the immediatists. The idealists advocate for the best possible solution with a timeline or cost that is unattainable in the short-term. […]
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Ephemeral barriers of the mind
Just like you, I have struggled with many problems of a wide variety in my life. Given my profession, many of these problems were challenges with technology. I worked my way up to leading an operations team by solving harder and more problems than others. I worked my way up to leading an architecture team […]
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Potassium and process ambiguity
It has been discovered that potassium is capable of being in two states of matter, at once. Potassium, and potentially other metals, can be a solid and a liquid simultaneously when extreme pressure and extreme temperature is applied. Some of the atoms of potassium are well formed and strong. They remain solid under these conditions […]
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Getting started with Godot
Over the last couple of months I’ve been having fun playing around with the Godot game engine. At first, I gravitated to the systems and back-end aspect of game development. My first version was a LAN connected multiplayer framework which could only go as far as connection and client synchronization. Peer to peer RPCs were […]
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Adaptation and the Mirror
I have never been one to understand the division between work and life personas. When I was in the U.S. Navy, I had to live with the same people that I worked with each day. Often, individuals would display their complete lack of integrity and disregard for others during the work day. Then I would […]
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Amazon Redshift Views, Sort Keys, and Outer Joins
My team built a process to load from a couple of base tables, in our Amazon Redshift enterprise data warehouse, into an other table which would act as a data mart entity. The data was rolled up and it included some derived fields. The SQL query had some complicity to it. This process ran daily […]
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IT Responsibility – Informed Consent
It is the technical professional’s responsibility to ensure that the business can give informed consent or they retain the burden of deciding for themselves.
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Defined Success and Role Clarity
If you have been following my blog, you know that I recently went through a burnout phase. Now I have begun a learning and analysis phase. I am definitely on the upswing of things. So why do I wander my house filling unfulfilled? Who wants to work late? I… do…? An odd thought occurred to […]
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The Collaboration Commission – Part 5
Architecture choices for cultural factors I was having a discussion with one of my team members. He questioned some of our early decisions which predated his involvement on the project. I began to give him a bit of history of the choice and realized, while I was explaining, that some of the benefits were never […]