I’ve started a new job. I’m now working with some of smartest people I’ve ever worked with, an impressive lot. One of them I owe a lot. He was a former prof. And he still makes my head spin with how easily he handles technology and how it can be applied to the real world. But what really gets me is that he remembers everything be it technology from the 70s or technology from yesterday. And he knows how to apply it individually or in concert to any given problem. It’s made me do something I should have done a long time ago, take a step back. I’ve been so close to problems that I’ve just been running. Running to stand still, as the old saying goes. I think it was partially the environment I found myself in. I needed to focus on getting work in and out as quickly as possible that I would grasp onto the first reasonable solution and run with it. Luckily, most of the time it was the optimal or near-optimal solution. But sometimes it wasn’t. The other day I realized that a few technologies I haven’t used in years — decades — were possibly
