I like DoorDash and have used them for a few years, across many cities (I travel often, I’m not sure what their analysis makes of the various places I’ve ordered from).

What’s amusing is that my home in Las Vegas is one of many where the routing algorithm used for their drivers takes them to the wrong place every single time. I’ve updated my delivery directions to include the cross streets that bracket my condo, but it never helps.

A driver finally showed me why … and it’s a classic example of either bad analysis or bad design in the UX.

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I needed a QuickBooks Desktop license to access a company file for a lawsuit, so I bought one. Being paranoid, of course I put it on a machine not on the internet so that nothing I did could expose it (it’s not my data, of course I wouldn’t want it accessible online).

Since I did have the new QB Desktop (QB Premier 2021) I fired it up to experiment with importing transactions.

And discovered that in order to use QB Desktop I had to be online and logged into Intuit.

For my security I had to expose my accounting data to the internet …

What?

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I’ve setup a single page website “brochure” for analysis services (link at the very bottom of this post). I don’t think most people realize that the sort of analysis that is done in software development can be used for solving many different problems. I’m going to see if I can help them.

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I wrote about how people and companies should help people learn to develop software who didn’t take the traditional university route (Developing Developer’s) and the Wall Street Journal today posted success stories of some who have taken non-traditional paths successfully in Blue-collar Workers Make the Leap to Tech Jobs. No college Degree Necessary.

This will, I hope, entice the recruiters who are seeking people expand their nets for entry level people. Job postings that demand degrees and many years of experience in a laundry list of tools will easily reject the people who have done what the journal article reports. I wrote about this last year in The Staffing Crisis. The same problem remains among the less skilled recruiters.

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The Wall Street journal today just posted an article Apps with Hidden Data Harvesting Software are Banned by Google, which is just one of many. I’m not even going to say it’s more egregious than many.

I worked on cybersecurity compliance for the nuclear power industry for a few years. I wasn’t doing the cyber protection itself (I’m not a security administrator, computer or network) but rather the software that enabled them to track all the details per NEI-0809. I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about security, and that includes having worked with classified data (oddly, as a site adminstrator) in USAF and having security certifications.

We want to trust; we want to believe that what we download, what we draw in from public repositories, even what we buy, is secure. It’s not.

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