Allison Moore-Plazyk

Be sure to mark your calendars for this one! #kcdnug #dotnet #questanalytics

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The recent ransomware attack on CDK Global reinforces the importance of cybersecurity for all industries. Make sure you’re prepared to protect your organization — and your bottom line — and learn why cybersecurity isn’t just an IT responsibility anymore. #cybersecurity #IT #automotive #cyberattack

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Some things I have learned building a "side gig" investing business: 🎉 It's fun! Investing has always been a hobby of mine, and turning it into a service for others is very rewarding. Especially when it works. 😊 🤔 You have to _keep_ it fun. Many times I've been tempted to seek venture funding to turn it into a "startup" and grow it like crazy...but my brother Benjamin Lyman (who co-founded with me) keeps me in check in that regard. We build because it's fun, not because we "have to", which would be the case if we had venture capital investors stipulating sales and growth targets. 👬 It's very important to pick the right partner(s). Not all partnerships work out, that's a fact of life. Fortunately my brother and I work really well together and are good complements to each others' skills. 😩 Keep trying. This is probably the 20th LLC that I've created during my career and it's the only successful one. Like science, you don't stop after your first failed experiment. You keep trying and failing until you get it right, then build upon that. 🏦 Financial companies appear to lag about 10 years behind current technology. It has been _extremely_ difficult to find a stock broker that could support our use-case with API's. The biggest broker we talked to even told us their "API" is to upload a CSV file of trades via FTP for them to execute. 🤯 📈 Data is king. Of all of the investing strategies out there, the best one we've found (and that we use) is to let the data tell you what to do. No magic numbers, no assumptions, and no guessing. Just back-test and let the numbers speak for themselves. 🤖 Automation makes it somewhat "passive". We're using cloud-based server-less functions that run every morning automatically....and most of the time we just watch the updates roll in and don't have to do anything. We've made a lot of money for our clients while we were on vacations. 🏖 💲 Control your costs. We keep reducing and simplifying, removing services and software licenses we don't _actually_ need to provide value for our clients. We're managing over $3M AUM and our monthly cloud spend....is less than $2.00 🤣 📰 Marketing is tough, especially for engineers. We apparently understand computers, data, and processes much better than we understand other humans. Still trying to figure out how much to try and do ourselves vs. outsourcing to someone else. Still in progress... we'll have to let you know how it goes. So far not so well. 😅 What things have you learned from your successful (or failed) side-gigs? What tips or advice would you give us? Please let us know in the comments! 💬 And if you want to keep up on how we're doing, we post our stats at the bottom of our webpage at www.lymanwealth.com

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Wow, y’all. What a conference! 14 sessions in 2 days and my brain is 🍝! But dang, are those noodles tasty! Props to all the folks who put together such a valuable learning experience at Agile & Beyond - it was my first time attending and I’m very much looking forward to returning next year! #agile #agileandbeyond2024 #detroittech #detroittechnology #itconference #agilebusiness #techcommunity

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Super interesting (and technical) breakdown on how the folks at ClickHouse are transforming the simple, flexible JSON format into something that can be leveraged at hyperscale. An excellent example of how sometimes scale can make you do crazy things.

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YES CODE. Every prospective customer of ours has brought something unique to the discussion, between the problem that needed smashing or the constraints of the tech investments they’d already made. The common thread is a need for something to pick up the slack where the one-size-fits-all platforms they bought don’t fit them, and it has to be bespoke to them and their problem – or it doesn’t work. At the end of the day, these needs always involve better managing their standardized, rules-based processes for operating their supply chain; and enlisting available data to help. The quickest, most reliable, and most valuable way to meet these needs is to help CODIFY the process and let that code drive that process, instance after instance. The teams that manage supply chains don’t need another SaaS portal zen garden to poke at daily. There’s fatigue with tech that only partially meets customers where they are, or forces them to actually alter the way they work. The expectation is that tech can reduce their workloads, not shift the work into a different “cloud first”/“AI native”/“modular platform” mode. What’s the point of digitizing all these operations if it doesn’t help teams shift what they’re able to spend their time focus on, not just the medium through which they get things done? The answer is not throwing customers into a WYSIWYG no-code flow chart editor where they can try to cobble together a working flow themselves from pre-defined components and logic gates, not for enterprise-scale problems. The “interstitial age” in freight tech that Nate Shutes coined a few months ago in response to folks like Don Everhart and Curtis Garrett wondering aloud “wheres the Zapier of freight” – we think that age is here, but the answer won’t look much like Zapier. The answer is certainly not punting off to a black-box AI that we hope might conjure up and perform the correct actions given the context. (There’s valuable uses of AI/ML in supply chain but it’s not _everything_ and it’s not even most things) What it looks like is actually sitting with supply chain leaders, understanding their problems, and then delivering, hosting, and maintaining the exact automations they need to make them vanish. Again, and again, and again. YES CODE.

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Transparent job search post. A lot of these lately, huh? :-) I've been searching in the software development and general software leadership spaces. Not because of the money or the fad of tech, but because I genuinely enjoy it and it peaks my curiosity since it's literally at the forefront of every modern industry conversation. I didn't grow up as a software engineer. I'm not an expert programmer, although I've built some cool tools for desktop environments and applications in VB.NET (all the java guys will just laugh). I don't have a CS degree. But what I do have is a variety of experience that gives me a unique perspective on solving problems. After all, that's what software engineering, or any engineering for that matter, is all about. If you need leadership for your team or product and want someone who can see business challenges for how they impact your top or bottom line while being able to talk about things like upgrading an elastic cluster to the next major version or searching in Dynatrace for a latency spikes, I'm your guy. If you need someone who can sit with business partners and make solid relationships with them because of understanding how their jobs actually work vs just throwing tech at them - again, that's a solid skill of mine. I won't ever claim to be an expert, but have the technical know-how to quickly learn just about anything and find my trusted advisors to keep it all afloat. If you're on the fence about hiring someone like me, hire me as a contractor and let me prove myself as a vendor without all the onboarding paperwork. I've got an LLC set up with liability and professional insurance, and would love to show you what I can do. If nothing else, a partnership could bloom and that's OK too! Y'all have a great Sunday night and keep shooting for the moon! If you're a searching person reading this - take heart, it's going to get better and if I can help somehow - let me know. Let's GO! #morein2024 #opentowork #jobseeker #softwareengineering #leadership #softwaremanagement #engineeringjobs

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One takeaway from DevOps Minneapolis Meetup: Charles Betz shared a principle which I didn't know about: treat platforms as products. For example, prioritizing what users actually need and bringing in people with a project management mindset or experience will significantly increase your ROI on building a new platform.

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Do you enjoy your planning rituals? Recently, we participated in a Program Increment (PI) planning event for a client in Chicago that left me genuinely inspired and eagerly anticipating the next one. Picture this: 140 + people, aiming to truly realign on business goals for the next six sprints. After breaking into groups and then reconvening for the first readout, the room erupted with cheers and high fives. The energy was contagious, with real excitement about the work ahead, and smiles all around. That moment sums up the true essence of Agile in business. It's not just about the practices or methodologies. It's about people, united around common goals and buzzing with energy, focused on delivering something they really believe in together. Some advice for tech leaders: when engagement wanes, reconnect with the human side. Help teams rediscover their "why". That's the key to maintaining motivation and driving exceptional results. #Agile #Teamwork #Leadership #PIPlanning #ProgramIncrementPlanning #ProjectManagement

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Ditch the pen and paper! Excited to share how PackageX’s software speeds up the receiving process with data extraction from shipping labels. Follow along with Kyle to see it in action! #Efficiency #LogisticsTech #DataExtraction

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Is your organization prepared for third-party tech failures? The recent CrowdStrike incident shows that blind faith in vendors can be costly, and a solid “plan B” is essential for resilience. Our latest article explores the importance of a solid backup plan for business resilience. #tech #technology

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Ever felt you are playing whack-a-mole when trying to improve resilience of a system? Don't lose hope! It could be from lowering the water line. I was introduced to this metaphor when I was losing hope. My team would diagnose an error, fix it and then, a few days later, experience a new error. We felt out-of-control, attacked from all angles and hopeless. A colleague explained that far from playing whack-a-mole we were "lowering the water line". Imagine you are responsible for a shipping lane but boats keep getting sunk against hidden rocks. You get a crew together who hunt out the rock and remove it. But, next day, boats are hitting other rocks. Their argument was that the second rocks were always there. But boats rarely encountered them because they were getting stranded on the first rock. By removing the first rock we "lowered the water line" and exposed new rocks. Only by lowering the water line would we discover problems that had been hidden all along. If we approach the problem from a Kaizen frame of mind, far from playing whack-a-mole we can see we are actually making progress. [This post was triggered by a conversation Patrick Scheid and I had this week].

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When business needs shift, aligning engineering efforts can be tough. For example, we were focused on reducing technical debt when the company needed a fast turnaround on a feature for a new partnership. It meant hitting pause on our current work, which wasn’t easy. I sat down with the team and explained the business impact—how the new feature would directly drive revenue and customer growth. We adjusted our roadmap, focusing on the quick win while setting a timeline to revisit our technical work. Clear communication helped the team see how their efforts aligned with bigger company goals, keeping everyone engaged and focused. #EngineeringMgmtMoments

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As per Brandon Suponchick, CTO of Aviture, in his session at the Kansas City Developer's Conference called "The Agile Architect: Building Product From The Trenches, Not The Tower," one of the many insights he shared was the importance of testing but even more foundational is that code needs to be testable. In order to have "architecture that evolves at the same pace as your business requirements," we need to start with code that is easy to test, and tests should be holistic and stable. If code design is poor and difficult test, our ability to change systems and deploy quickly will be limited. We need to be able to ensure our code will not break through sufficient tests. This includes unit tests. #KCDC #KCDC2024

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This is an absolute treat - two thought leaders Allen Holub and Dave Farley respectfully challenge each other on a topic that resonates with me. 👉 "It is easy to have great numbers in your DORA metrics and still be doing things wrong!" - Allen makes a great point! It is important to remember that while metrics are helpful, they need the right context to paint the complete picture. DORA metrics offer some great insights into our engineering performance, but they're just one part of the puzzle. Metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate offer essential benchmarks for technical proficiency. But let's not forget that engineering's core purpose extends beyond these metrics — it's about driving real value for the business. It's not just about tweaking technical stuff, but ensuring engineering outcomes align with the business outcomes. So let's strive not just for impressive numbers but for meaningful results that propel organizations forward. Remember: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure! #DevOps #EngineeringExcellence #SoftwareEngineering

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A very different blog post this week! https://lnkd.in/gHNgqeGs Over the years, I’ve realized that keeping the “Main Thing” at the forefront is hard! However, it's essential for not only getting the right things done but for finding fulfillment in the journey. I often looked for quick and straightforward tracking tools that would help bring clarity to complex priorities and sharpen my focus on the core purpose behind each goal. This is my attempt at such a tool.

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Finally wrapping up an effort to take some technical notes and thoughts I have been working over the last several years, and then publishing into a blog. From an implementation side, modest effort if that, a NextJS implementation. Much more difficult to fine tune a writing style, and define what type of content I would like to present. So far, this has been a great exercisize to reflect on thoughts, create a few small side projects for practice.  The Internet has not shortage of 'how to' articles, which are consumed at the speed of light by ChatGPT, digested, and a lot of the time the answers provided fairly right, or sometimes dead on. I was iniitially reluctant add redundant content (how to do 'x' with 'y'), but decided there might be value is sharing ideas and side projects.  So anyways, my first stab at this is available at the following URL, in draft format. Enjoy!  https://lnkd.in/gxi9zjV4

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