A spoonful of Kool-Aid

Inside Bill’s Brain : An infomercial chockful of tang

I finally had a chance this weekend to sit down and watch the three-part Netflix documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain” about Bill Gates. As someone who worked at Microsoft in the waning years of significant “Bill involvement” through his transition into his next chapter of life, I was really curious how he would be portrayed in the series. Would it be hit job or love fest? Have you ever flipped through the channels and landed on one of those five hour long Time-Life commercials that featured a musical collection of the greatest hits of the 70s and 80s? But if you order now, you will also get the 90’s Dance Party Mix CD as a free gift? Even though you know …

Leadership means taking an active interest in your people.

In my humble opinion, leadership means you absolutely must take an active and genuine interest in your people. People can smell a phony from far away. But sincerity is always heard at an emotional level even if the feedback is unwelcome, constructive, or challenging. This is especially true with technology-oriented organizations where pragmatism and cynicism are often conflated and trust must universally be earned. \Mm

Michael Manos Leading the Panel Discussion

Merchants Advisory Group Annual Meeting Redux

Earlier this morning I had the pleasure of hosting a panel on the technology architecture, software development, and infrastructure stacks required across the payment landscape of today’s regulatory and business demand. Fintech (in all of its flavors and varieties) of course is a hot topic and the attendance in the room was a good indicator on the importance and focus on these issues. My panel consisted of some of the biggest brands in the merchant space with a wide diversity of go-to-market, technology, and business approaches. My panelists represented BestBuy, Etsy, McDonalds and Walmart and more than that, those panelists are the ones who are front and center for the technology revolution happening in those firms for the payments space. …

Running your own private Certificate Authority + RFC8555 delivery

In announcement today via blog by Mike Malone, Small Step announced version v0.13.0 which will allow you to essentially build and run your own ACME based Certificate Authority. While I have not played with this yet, I can tell you that this is a functionality I have been looking for across a couple of personal projects. and conceptually the ability to automate and centralize some of this functionality is exciting. I am super excited to take a crack at this and see how well it works. That is once I get some free time from normal work activities. Just wanted to give a thumbs up shout out to the folks at Smallstep For more information, check out to the post …