Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: Technology

Beware of Asymmetric Risk/Reward Profiles

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Would you continue to sell a lock based on technology that has been known for 14 years to be trivially easy to hack? Of course not! But Scantron in Denmark has merrily been foisting insecure locks on unsuspecting Danish apartment administrators. Even after a worried renter told them about the problem in several emails and even physical letters (!), they ignored the problem. It took a media shitstorm to make them realize the errors of their ways.

Digital locks have an asymmetric risk/reward profile. The reward is small – you save a little by not having to administer physical keys and re-key locks. The risk is huge – someone might copy a key, turn it into a master key, and rob hundreds of apartments.

When you are evaluating digitalization projects, be very careful about those with such an asymmetric profile. Almost every organization has digitalization projects with a better risk/reward balance than digital locks…

IT Leadership has to Harness the Power of AI

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AI has finally gotten really useful inside the IT organization. Most of the examples on the internet are frivolous and amusing, like how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, written in the style of the King James Bible. But ChatGPT is helpful for mundane tasks in IT as well.

I’ve been fixing open issues in a small open-source project recently. One of the issues was that part of the code would concatenate strings to build SQL statements. That’s a classic SQL Injection vulnerability. ChatGPT can fix these bugs faster than I can. So I tell the AI, “please rewrite the following to use bind variables,” and give it the code.

Another example is working we legacy shell scripts. My sed/awk skills are rusty, but I can give a convoluted shell statement to ChatGPT, and it will patiently explain all the options and exactly how it works.

Many of your programmers are already playing with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other AI tools. You might as well embrace it. Set up a knowledge-sharing community for those curious about how AI can help IT. Have them present to you and the rest of the IT department. You’ll be amazed if you haven’t played with ChatGPT and its ilk.

This 47-Year-Old Classic Will Improve Your IT Skills

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There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who know who Fred Brooks was and those who don’t. If you are an IT professional in the second group, you can step up your game dramatically by reading his seminal book “The Mythical Man-Month.”

Fred Brooks managed IBM System/360, the project that produced the first real general-purpose computer back in the 1960s. He distilled his experience from this 5,000-man-year project into the first edition of TMMM in 1975 and the expanded anniversary edition from 1995 stands on my bookshelf. When I meet other experienced IT architects, as at Software Architecture Open Space in Copenhagen this month, people will use phrases like “second-system effect” that originated with Brooks. He passed away yesterday after a long and productive life full of accolades.

To commemorate Fred Brooks, I’m inviting you to join a series of online discussions on IT best practices and what we can still learn from The Mythical Man-Month. We’ll meet on Zoom every Thursday at 5 pm CET = 11 am EST = 8 am PST. We’ll discuss one chapter from the book and how it applies to our work in IT today. I expect each meeting will be 30-60 minutes, and we’ll record it for those who can’t make it. We start next Thursday, November 24. Sign up here: https://vester.li/tmmm

Join us online to share experience and improve your IT skills

Very Few Things are Impossible

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You can get anything you want. But you have to ask for it. The U.S. had an election last Tuesday, and they still don’t know the result. We had an election in Denmark on Nov 1st. As usual, our result was ready before midnight on election day.

Now, we actually count paper ballots here in Denmark, and the U.S. uses computers. But that isn’t the whole explanation of why we are so much faster. The main reason is that we have decided that we want a quick result. Thus, we have a cut-off date for advance voting three days before election day, and all the advance votes are ready to count on election day. Vote counting is easily parallelized, and we have enough people counting. The U.S. could do the same, but they have prioritized other factors.

When IT says something can’t be done, it is rarely true. It might indeed be difficult, or expensive, or require you to give up functionality of higher value. If you work in IT, don’t say something is impossible. If you request work from IT, don’t accept the answer of “impossible.”

How to Avoid Techno-Blindness

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Techno-blindness is a dangerous affliction. It is a disease of over-optimism mainly affecting people in the technology industry. The symptom is overconfidence that a system works as intended and a lack of awareness of what might go wrong.

Somebody in Moscow thought it was a cool idea to have a computer play chess with children, using a robotic arm to move the pieces. Until a child made an unexpected movement. The robot grabbed his hand and broke his finger. TuSimple is building autonomous trucks, and one of them accidentally executed an old instruction, causing it to turn left in the middle of the highway. Fortunately, nobody was injured as the truck veered across the I-10 and slammed into a barrier.

Important systems need independent safeguards. That means a completely separate piece of code that can intervene if the output of an algorithm lies outside some boundary. A truck shouldn’t be able to turn left at high speed. A robotic arm shouldn’t move on the chessboard until the player’s hands are off the pieces.

As a CTO, it is your job to ensure there are safeguards around important systems. You cannot depend on techno-blind developers to do this by themselves.