Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

The Power of the Mind

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

You can think yourself healthier. Scientists have just published another placebo effect study, this time showing increased vaccine effectiveness. The people who did positive thinking exercises showed increased antibody production after 14 and 28 days.

The inverse is that you can probably also think yourself sicker, though for ethical reasons this has not been studied.

Make sure you have a technique for getting yourself in a better mood. For some, it can be uplifting music. For others, it might be a walk in nature. Spend a few moments identifying something that energizes you. And then do it today.

Risk Evaluation

IT Leadership, ,

Do you have a paper map in your car? No, why would I need that?

If you are a Verizon customer in the U.S., you were just reminded. A large chunk of their network was down for half a day, leaving frustrated customers depending on their atrophied geographical memory. Verizon says the culprit was the usual botched network upgrade, not evil hackers. Some Europeans are better prepared, having routinely been subjected to Russian jamming of GPS and Galileo navigation.

When was the last time you revisited the risk evaluation of your critical systems? The threats are changing and increasing, and your risk evaluation from one year ago no longer applies.

Downside Thinking

IT Leadership, ,

What is the downside? That is the critical question for any kind of decision. Someone has an idea, and they will present the upside. We can save so much money, develop faster, offer better customer service, etc., etc. It is your job as a leader and decision-maker to ferret out the downside.

Lack of downside consideration is behind many questionable business decisions. Twitter seems to offer a new example of Elon’s lack of downside thinking every week. Like “Let’s offer a feature that changes any photo to show the person in a bikini.” Normal people, doing even the most minimal downside consideration, would kill that idea in seconds. But Twitter/X rolled it out – and obviously had to roll it back.

You can do the downside thinking yourself for many decisions. For more complicated scenarios, you might need a dedicated Red Team or outside help to identify the downside. But before any decision, ask yourself: Have we considered the downside?

The Power of a Word

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

What is today’s word? I learned from my wife to assign one word to every day. I do it in the morning as I sit with my coffee, look at my garden, and contemplate how to spend this day.

If you just look at your task list, it will contain dozens of things you could do with your day. Letting your mind wander and settle on one word will tell you what is really important today. On some days, it will be something productivity-focused like “programming” or “debugging.” On other days, it might be development-oriented like “learn” or “clarity.” If your mind comes up with “rest,” that is a strong indication that you’ve been pushing yourself too hard.

Try it out. Set one word for the day tomorrow morning, and reflect on your day tomorrow evening. If having a focus word helps you, make it a habit.

Find a Network

IT Leadership,

Let 2026 be a year where you expand your network and learn something new. If you are based in Denmark, work with IT architecture and is a member of Finansforbundet, a good option is to join the IT architecture network group. Participation is free, and we meet four times in 2026. First time is February 26th, where the topic is the role of the IT architect today and in the future.

The world of IT has never moved faster. Find someone to exchange knowledge with.

Make Your Task a Habit

Spiritual Programmer, ,

If you have a large task to complete and it doesn’t easily break into components, make it a daily habit.

My digital photo catalog contains 68,255 images right now. Some are tagged and evaluated, many are not. I have created a habit of working a little on cleaning up my photo collection every day. That means I feel I’m progressing towards my goal of having everything organized, even though there is still a long way to go.

For me, it works to have a habit-tracking app that reminds me not to “break the chain” every evening if I haven’t gotten around to a little photo sorting during the day. But you can also establish a habit by piggybacking it onto something you already do.

The difference between feeling in control and feeling overwhelmed by large tasks is whether you are moving towards your goal or are standing still. Move.

AI is not Coming for Your Job

IT Leadership,

In a real-world test, the best AI completed 1 in 40 full tasks satisfactorily. Researchers put together the Remote Labor Index, a set of 100 typical remote working tasks – data visualization, architecture drawing, game development, etc. These are the kind of tasks you would normally give to remote gig workers through an online task platform.

The results are sobering. The best AI was Manus, delivering 2.5% acceptable results. Gemini 2.5 Pro managed only 0.8% task completion.

Don’t be blinded by the fact that AI can solve a few very specific tasks well. In the real world, AI is very, very far from taking anybody’s job.

Excel Addiction

IT Leadership,

It’s not your data, it’s the company’s data. That’s why it belongs in a database or some other kind of managed data store, not in your personal Excel files. But it turns out to be very difficult to break a 40-year habit of circumventing Central IT and hacking something together with a few macros.

There is any number of well-documented disasters caused by excessive Excel use, including during the Coronavirus pandemic, where the UK health authorities used an old version to track infections. It took days before anybody noticed that the number of cases was stuck at exactly 65,536.

Everybody is talking about having an AI policy. You need that. But you also need a data policy. And part of that policy is going to be placing limits on Excel.

Simple Health

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

To improve your health, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. Don’t start an intricate supplement regimen or try to follow a complex set of dietary guidelines. The traveling snake oil salesman has moved online and is now a health influencer, but that doesn’t remove the quackery.

Decide on one parameter you want to track (weight, sleep, whatever) and make one simple change to your life. For weight loss, it could be preparing more meals from scratch. For sleep, it could be putting down your phone one hour before bedtime. Track your adherence to your chosen change and the tracked parameter for two weeks.

If you got results, good.

If you didn’t, either your adherence wasn’t strong because you couldn’t implement the change consistently, or the change didn’t affect the tracked parameter. Never mind. Choose another change and try again.

Digital Sovereignty

IT Leadership, ,

You need to think about Digital Sovereignty. Unless you are in the U.S., of course. For everybody else, this is a very salient topic. Especially for us in Denmark these days.

This doesn’t mean that you have to free yourself from every American cloud provider. But it does mean there is a new item in your risk evaluation: Ending up on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blocklist.

Likelihood is Rare (1) for almost everybody. But if Impact is Catastrophic (5), you end up with a medium risk: Mitigate if cost-effective.

Switching costs almost always make it not cost-effective to transition a running system. But when you are building anything new, you don’t have switching costs. And an effective mitigation is to avoid using U.S. providers.