Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

In his insightful talk " We Are All in Sales " at SQLBits 2024 , Nick Harshbarger emphasizes that we unknowingly sell something every day, highlighting how developing the ability to promote our ideas and skills within our organizations can significantly advance our careers and propel us to new professional heights. Having spent time in technical pre-sales, the content resonated with me. Slides from his session - What is a SalesPerson? Traits - • Loud. • Pushy (borderline obnoxious), • They fill my Inbox with SPAM. • Call at the worst times possible. • Waaaaaay over-confident. • Did I say Loud? Expanded Definition • a person whose job is to sell a product or service in a given territory, in a store, or by telephone : a salesman or saleswoman  • A person whose job includes selling ideas, concepts, vision, direction, change, etc., up and down the org. What makes a SalesPerson According to Forbes Oct 5, 2021 Practices active listening. Finds emotional connection. Understands the ...

David Perell , writer, founder & instructor, Write of Passage explains his idea of Personal Monopoly - The Internet rewards unique people. Find your unique combination of skills, interests, and personality traits.  I call this a Personal Monopoly. Become the only person in the world who does what you do.  Then, tell the world by sharing your knowledge. Visual summary by Carole Alalouf Below are some of his thoughts on this topic, taken from his bite-sized tweets: We are often blind to our own Personal Monopolies. Like fish in water, we don't know how to explain what we do so we depend on others to define our work for us. Listen to others describe your work. Then, double down on the best summaries . As you build your Personal Monopoly, listen for C.U.E.S: 1) Complementary: Greater than the sum of its parts. 2) Unusual: A combination of skills rarely seen. 3) Experiential: Inspired by unique events in your life. 4) Specific: Niche topic where you have lots of knowledge. Whe...

Patrick Winston's How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. Summary based on notes by @BoyInTech & other YouTube commentators - 00:00 🎖 Communication skills are vital for success in life; speaking, writing, and idea quality matter. 01:25 🏆 Knowledge, practice, and inherent talent influence effective communication; knowledge matters most. 02:20 📢 Learning various speaking techniques can significantly impact your success; a non-linear process. 03:17 📵 Avoid distractions during learning; laptops and cell phones off to engage fully. 04:39 🚀 Don't start with a joke, start with a promise, outlining what listeners will gain from the talk .  06:01 🔄 Repetition and cycling ideas can help ensure better understanding among the audience. 06:58 🧱 Build a fence around your idea to differentiate it from others and avoid c...

Highlights from  a TED talk  by Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist who has studied kids and adults in different kinds of challenging settings to find out who is successful and why  - In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.  Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals . Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.    Talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.  T...

Paraphrased notes from the HBR article " The Elements of Good Judgment " -  Judgment—the ability to combine personal qualities with relevant knowledge and experience to form opinions and make decisions.  6 components that contribute to good judgment & how to improve them:  Learning - Listen attentively, read critically Trust - Seek diversity, not validation from colleagues & advisors Experience - Make it relevant but not narrow. Challenge assumptions. Detachment - Identify and then challenge biases. Understand, clarify, and accept different viewpoints. Options - Question the solution set offered and debate all the options. Delivery - Factor in the feasibility of execution and risk mitigation plans. Leaders with good judgment skills typically have these qualities: They are good listeners and readers—able to hear what other people actually mean, and thus able to see patterns that others do not. They ask questions which are designed...

Some fundamentals and basics of networking by Arnold Britto : Attend relevant events, get-togethers, gatherings, and association meetings; Meet as many people as possible; Gather information at the event/gathering; Assess information and store relevant data of contacts met at these gatherings; Follow-up with relevant contacts through telephone conversations or personal meetings; Keep constant track of progress with your contact base and leads; Delete contacts that are not relevant and make space for new contacts; Increase intensity.

Drawing by Sukumar Ray Sukumar Ray (father of  Satyajit Ray) was serious, lively and intensely curious, and a natural story-teller. He would show his brothers and sisters pictures of weird and wonderful animals from their father’s storybooks and invent his own stories about them. He created his own creatures too, with untranslatable onomatopoeic names – forerunners of the verses and drawings which today are loved wherever Bengali is spoken. He also dreamed up a novel way of relieving frustration through story-telling – ‘Fake Anger’, as he called it. Like his son Satyajit, Sukumar was famously even-tempered from early childhood on. If one of his friends felt angry with somebody but could not get back at him, Sukumar would say, ‘All right, let’s fake some anger!’ Then he would begin spinning strange stories about his victim, with everyone else joining in. ‘There was no hatred or malice in them,’ recalls his sister Punyalata, in her memoir Chelebelar Dinguli (Those Childhood Days; 195...

This Week I Learned -  * Trusted Research Environments (TRE) enforce a secure boundary around distinct workspaces to enable information governance controls to be enforced. * The default public IP for your WordPress Amazon Lightsail instance changes if you stop and start your instance. A static IP address, attached to an instance , stays the same even if you stop and start your instance. * Differences between Amazon EC2 and Amazon Lightsail * What features Lightsail does and doesn't offer compared with other AWS services *  Larry Ellison introduced OCI  at Open World 2016.  * OCI's first 10TB of regional data egress is free per month.  In AWS , the first 100 gigabytes per month of data transfer out from all AWS Regions (except China and GovCoud) is free & in Azure first 5GB / Month is free.  * Compartments are a logical construct that create security and billing boundaries for all resources within OCI, and they map really nicely to real world...

This Week I Learned -  * To use an Azure file share with Windows, you must either mount it, which means assigning it a drive letter or mount point path, or access it via its UNC path. Unlike other SMB shares you may have interacted with, such as those hosted on a Windows Server, Linux Samba server, or NAS device, Azure file shares do not currently support Kerberos authentication with your Active Directory (AD) or Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity. Instead, you must access your Azure file share with the storage account key for the storage account containing your Azure file share. A storage account key is an administrator key for a storage account, including administrator permissions to all files and folders within the file share you're accessing, and for all file shares and other storage resources (blobs, queues, tables, etc) contained within your storage account. * While a blob is in archive storage, the blob data is offline and can't be read or modified. To read or downlo...

 This Week I Learned - * For migration, Microsoft recommends that you use the Azure Migrate service to migrate VMs and servers to Azure, rather than the Azure Site Recovery service. Azure Site Recovery should be used for disaster recovery only . If you've already started your migration journey with Site Recovery, you can continue using it to complete your migration . * Data wrangling still takes the lion’s share of time in a typical data professional’s day. Data scientists spend 45% of their time on data preparation tasks like loading and cleaning data according to Anaconda’s annual survey * What is the difference between App Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization? App Virtualization leverages Remote Desktop Services (RDS) technology to publish and run applications in the data center, sharing those apps to multiple users who view the application remotely on their endpoint device. App virtualization focuses on delivering just an individual application or set of apps, while v...

Key takeaways from the HBR article " How to Improve Your Sales Skills, Even If You’re Not a Salesperson " Very few parents say they want their kids to grow up to be a salesperson. And yet Sales is the most fundamental skill. Selling is persuading, inspiring, and leading. Your goal is to work in collaboration with a client or colleague to drive change. Figure out what’s important to your client and what business problems they’re trying to solve. Figure out your customer’s motivations - what do they need to accomplish and how do they measure success? Do your research by talking with the people you’re trying to win over, and others in the know, well in advance of making your proposal.  Enlist a trusted peer or manager to role-play so you can see what works and what doesn’t while crafting your sales pitch Your goal is to understand how the flow of these conversations feels and sounds so that you know how you come across and how to improve your delivery.  Even w...

This Week I Learned - * When you migrate applications to Azure, you can continue to use your security information and event management (SIEM) software, combining cloud and on-premises security information into your existing system of monitoring and control. You can also take advantage of Azure SEIM and other security capabilities, including Azure Sentinel, an  artificial intelligence-based SEIM, Azure Advanced Threat Protection for network security and Azure Key Vault for secure storage of application credentials and data. *  Microsoft's partnership with internet service providers (ISPs), internet exchange providers (IXPs), and software-defined cloud interconnect (SDCI) providers worldwide enables Azure Peering Service to extend the optimized path to the customer network and the last mile. Default routing of traffic for best performance in Azure Traffic routed with the new network service tier in Azure *  Operations Management Suite (OMS) was a bundling of...

This Week I Learned - *  Container support in Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to use parts of a subset of Azure Cognitive Services APIs that are available in Azure *  For agent-based migration, Azure Migrate appliance is not mandatory. It is only required if you want server assessment before migration. * In the last three years, Cognizant has moved from being a Niche Player to Challenger and now Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide 2020 * A subtype of AI, deep neural networks or DNNs can identify important lesions missed by gastroenterologists during endoscopy and colonoscopy. Deep learning and other forms of AI have also been applied to predict clinical outcomes from electronic health records (EHRs), promote patient safety using machine-vision monitoring, process massive datasets from genome sequencing, provide immediate patient-generated data feedback and synthesize notes from patie...

This Week I Learned - * Azure is the first public cloud to offer virtualization infrastructure for confidential computing that uses hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs). Even cloud administrators and datacenter operators with physical access to the servers cannot access TEE-protected data.  Azure DCsv2 confidential computing virtual machines run on servers that implement Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). Because Intel SGX hardware protects your data and keeps it encrypted while the CPU is processing it, even the operating system and hypervisor cannot access it, nor can anyone with physical access to the server. By combining the scalability of the cloud and ability to encrypt data while in use, new scenarios are possible now in Azure, like confidential multi-party computation where different organizations combine their datasets for compute-intensive analysis without being able to access each other’s data. Examples include banks combining transactio...