Ti Point Tork

Nat’s 2022 Technical Link Pile: Intro

December 30, 2022 – 7:06 pm
I used to read a lot of the technical web and social media for O'Reilly Media, where I wrote the daily "Four Short Links" digest. I still read a lot of online content, but now for my own purposes. I've been CEO and now CTO of a company that makes retail management software (ERP, POS, and other acronyms for fashion retailers), so I'm short of time and my reading is focused on things relevant to my needs. I kept track of the interesting things I found, and sorted them loosely into piles. Those piles are: C# and .NET Front End/Flutter/Dart/UI SQL Server/Databases Security Dev, Architecture, APIs Product Management GPT-3 Interesting Software Random Each pile is now a post on this blog. Each post is a list of entries, sorted reverse chronologically. Italicised text is quoted from the site. I've datestamped the entries. I'm shallowest on C#, SQL Server, and Flutter. We make on-prem WinForms software and I'm simultaneously coming up to speed on ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

Acoustic Bandcamp Recommendations

May 1, 2022 – 9:30 pm
Last updated: 2022-04-10 Bandcamp is a great place to buy music, because most of the money you pays goes straight to the artist. If you buy on a special Bandcamp Friday, then Bandcamp don’t even take their usual commission on the sale -- all the money goes straight to the artist. I like acoustic stringband music, with or without vocals. I go beyond those boundaries for great music. Here are some sounds you should check out. It’s a mixture of famous and up-and-coming, instrumental and vocal, boundary-pushing and traditionally brilliant. Molly Tuttle’s Bluegrass Record Crooked Tree is solid gold from Molly Tuttle. She’s assembled an incredible band and they have been just SMASHING it on the road. Finally (Apr 1) the album is out and I am rejoicing! Look for this in the awards season. Soulful modern acoustic music The Lonely Heartstring Band got their start playing Beatles covers on bluegrass instruments, and went on to ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

5G Public Works Project

May 12, 2020 – 11:22 pm
I've seen a few people propose a big government project around 5G mobile technology. I couldn't find more detail to any proposals, so I did my own research to inform my own opinions on what's needed and what's not. I wrote up where I landed so I won't forget it, and I'm sharing in case it's useful to you. If you have corrections, etc. please contact me on Twitter as @gnat or in email (nathan@torkington.com). Abstract In the runup to the 2017 general election, there was talk of government investment in 5G networks to get greater coverage in rural and remote areas. MBIE canvassed opinion as part of a consultation around spectrum auctions, but took no action. This idea has resurfaced as a Public Works project to “get New Zealand moving again”. This paper is a backgrounder for the issue and decision points. Mobile Technology: A Primer Spectrum Mobile phones communicate with cell towers using ...

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Joining a startup? Read this.

January 22, 2019 – 7:34 pm
Here's a braindump of some things I've learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren't representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I've been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, and someone just became my excuse. Maturity Startups are very immature organisations, unlike a corporate or university -- I always describe it as "there's more work to do than there are people to do it". So there's huge opportunity to do stuff you wouldn't ordinarily do, which is great. There's also a lot less support, which can be unnerving. There's nothing preventing you from working super-long hours and burning out, and only your coworkers to notice (HR is almost non-existent in very early stage startups). And even compensation is weird ("stock options"?) and can bite you if you're not prepared. Startups have a ...

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The T in CTO doesn’t stand for Talk

August 28, 2018 – 9:53 pm
Looks like NZ will get a CTO real soon now. It's hard to avoid the word "debacle" in describing how it came about: a false start at making an appointment, a whiff of impropriety in the appointments process that resulted in a Ministerial demotion .... This is a shame because there are very real reasons that NZ should be increasing its IT heft in Government. There’s the potential to do a lot of good at the intersection of IT and government: preventing blowouts, giving informed advice to the civil service, and being a trusted advisor to politicians. Other countries are tackling these problems, with and without a person whose job title is CTO. Preventing blowouts: in the government version of "adding a person to a late project only makes it later", the risk of IT project failure rises with every dollar budgeted. The last government had Treasury monitoring progress of important ...

Posted in Gov 2.0, New Zealand, politics | No Comments »

Proposed Changes to NZ’s R&D Incentives

May 29, 2018 – 12:24 am
There's an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ's R&D incentives. In particular, they'll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas expenditure on R&D). The proposed R&D Tax Incentive has no R&D intensity threshold, a much higher cap and lower minimum R&D expenditure threshold than the Growth Grant. Some firms may get less money, but others might get more. This policy is very clearly aimed at large and profitable companies. If you're a Fonterra, or a Mainfreight, or a TradeMe, you can receive a discount on the tax you pay on your profits. That's good: we want these companies to increase their spending on R&D. Another 1% spend from them represents ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, politics, Rant, Technology | No Comments »

Twitter’s Summer Reading List

December 21, 2017 – 10:39 am
I asked my Twitter friends for recommendations of books to read over Christmas. I said that I've already consumed the new Expanse novel and the new Philip Pullman (intended to indicate that I like that style of sf) and I said I like non-fiction if it's interesting and well-written (e.g., Bakewell's book on Montaigne, or Holmes's "Age of Wonder"). Here's what they recommended ... Artemis by Andy Weir (the sequel to The Martian). Recommended by @lancewiggs. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Recommended by @lancewiggs and @stojg. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Recommended by @lancewiggs, @mceoin, and @obra. The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve Levine. Recommended by @lancewiggs. The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World's Greatest Teams by Sam Walker. Recommended by @lancewiggs. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Recommended by @MattNippert. Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Recommended by @mandysinpson. The Way of Kings: Stormlight Archive Book ...

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

On Moving to New Zealand

November 9, 2016 – 6:38 pm
Hello, American friends!  President-Elect Trump has given his speech and begun to redact his campaign website of the obviously illegal and impossible campaign promises, and you look up from your keyboard through an election-defeat hangover and want to move to New Zealand. First of all, consider staying.  America’s problems won’t be solved if all the tolerant and progressive people leave. But that's not an easy choice for everyone.  If you don’t think you’ll be safe, or you're concerned about the effects on your children of growing up in the cloud of President Trump, you might be looking elsewhere. Allow me to suggest New Zealand. New Zealand has a fairly straightforward skilled migrant immigration scheme, where you get points for meeting certain criteria and if you clear a particular number of points then you can move here.  Some of those criteria are around education, language, and health, effectively biasing it against people who don’t speak English, those who aren’t highly-educated, as ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics | No Comments »

“Outcome is a function of process”

October 30, 2016 – 10:21 am
I was just catching up on Tim Kong's excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter: "One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. That might sound a little dry to some, but looking back at every major loss we've had over the years, they mostly started with us thinking too far ahead of the game." I like that quote a lot.  There's a lot you can find in it: You can't do success.  Instead, you can only run, pass, tackle, communicate ... all of which can contribute to success. Even in a game with as many different plays, player matchups, imbalances, and opportunities as rugby, the winners are winners because they have s system that generates wins. The team's playbook must necessarily be flexible, because it will be used ...

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Startups and failure

October 25, 2016 – 10:26 am
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here's my response in a vintage retro format known as "a blog post") You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING always kills the startup.  And someone is always responsible for the fatal decisions. That’s “pilot error” for startups. But hindsight is far easier than foresight. Everybody does the best they can with the info and skills they have.  Everyone operates with imperfect knowledge and incomplete control. Everyone. Investors, board, executive, and rank and file all act with imperfect information. They don’t have a choice. The pattern-matching we hate in VCs is just a reaction to the fog of the market. “Maybe past performance will predict future success?” The hardest part of bringing something ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »