Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The term "Big Data" peaked as a buzzword around 2012-2015 and has since faded into background terminology. It followed the classic Gartner hype cycle: explosive marketing, overpromises, disillusionment, and normalization. It's not "dead" in substance. Data volumes keep exploding, processing tools improved, and organizations still handle massive datasets daily. Market projections show the big data tech sector growing robustly into the 2030s. Claims of total irrelevance ignore that petabyte-scale work is routine now. But the phrase lost pop-culture and consultant cachet. That's the real shift. Why the term declined: Hype exhaustion and failed prophecies. Early 2010s rhetoric promised a data cataclysm requiring exotic tools (Hadoop everywhere) for revolutionary insights. The apocalypse didn't arrive at predicted scale for most orgs; hardware/cloud scaled predictably, and "whatever doesn't fit on one machine" kept shrinking as single machines g...

Key takeaways from Ryan Kitchens talk "How Did Things Go Right? Learning More from Incidents" based on his experience at Netflix: Failure is ever-present in modern software systems Success isn’t necessarily the absence of failure, and having 99.999% uptime is practically meaningless if the users are unable to use the system as they intend.  Safety, great performance, and sources of resilience do not come from the absence of failure but rather the presence of adaptive capacity . Moving from "Why did things go wrong?" ask "How did things go right?" is a challenging but valuable exercise. Find out - What's going on when it seems like nothing is happening? When failure does occur, what's going to keep it from being worse? How do teams adapt successfully when preventative techniques fail? How should we prioritize the effort to develop systems that help us safely manage the consequences of failure? Recovery is better than prevention. An incident occurs w...

Some of the most beloved tracks in pop history are built on lyrics that, on paper, should be complete gibberish. Yet they somehow feel profound, catchy, and emotionally true. It’s remarkably similar to how modern AI strings together convincing words — fluent, rhythmic, and evocative, even when there’s no deeper literal meaning behind them. Two perfect examples are Nik Kershaw’s 1984 synth-pop earworm “The Riddle” and A.R. Rahman’s infectious “Mental Madhilo” (Telugu) / “Mental Manadhil” (Tamil) from the 2015 film OK Bangaram / O Kadhal Kanmani . Both prove that sometimes the less the words mean, the more they resonate. Nik Kershaw has been refreshingly honest for decades: “The Riddle” is deliberate nonsense. He scribbled the cryptic, vivid lines (“Near a tree by a river, there’s a hole in the ground / Where an old man of Aran goes around and around”) as a temporary guide vocal and never replaced them. The band loved the flow, the public turned it into a massive hit, and generations ha...