The Good Life
Friday, April 27, 2018
End of the Wild: Shipwrecked in the Pacific Northwest
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CN8TKGR
Friday, August 21, 2015
Check Out My Family Adventure Blog
I know I've been quiet for a while, ok a really long while, but I'd like you to check out another blog where my family and I have been quite active.
If you are interested in free range families, raising kids on the road (and on the water), living a nomadic life while working in the tech industry, or just want to see what we've been up to, check it out here: Free Range Family
It has sailing, adventure, a really cute dog, a VW Vanagon (complete with many break downs), at least one fire, travel through Europe, a crazy cooking show and more. I think you'll enjoy it.
See you over there!
Friday, August 9, 2013
Security Innovation Values
Introduction
The following statements represent core Security Innovation values. These are the foundation on which we’ve built our success as a company, both in terms of delighted customers and happy long-term employees. We have an enviable track record of customer success, in which a vast majority of our business is repeat or word-of-mouth. We have an incredible record of employee satisfaction with turnover that is significantly lower than the average technology company or application security vendor. As the company grows we want to hold onto that success and maintain the SI feeling that we all love.In the sections below, External values are those that most directly affect our customers, how we interact with and provide value to our customers. The Internal values are those that most directly affect us as employees, how we interact with each other and maintain a high quality, professional environment and great work-life balance.External
- Everyone has the right to secure softwareInternal
- We empower our employees to learn and develop their skillsThursday, June 6, 2013
Vision Mission Values
As Security Innovation gets bigger we've realized we need some way to preserve what makes the company special, for our customers and for our employees. I think it all comes down to Values, since that's what describes the 'Why' of what we do. Why is so much more important than What since it is the foundation, the motivation behind everything we do and in the end I think its the best way to capture the magic of who we are as a company. I think many people would start an excercise like this by defining Vision and Mission first, a top down approach. We've found its more powerful to start with values and build upwards from there.
First some definitions:
- Vision: Where do you want to go? What's over the horizon?
- Mission: Who are you? What do you do?
- Values: What do you value? Why are you doing what you do? What's important and if you gave it up would destroy the value of the company?
- A world free of security vulnerabilities
- To be the most trusted application security partner on the planet.
- To enable the success of our customer's application security programs.
- Improve the security of every application we touch
- Provide the world’s best combination of security expertise, trustworthiness, effectiveness, and technology to our customers
- Apply Standards, Education and Education (the Three Pillars of Success) to create a customized solution for each of our customers.
- Drive the success of each customer's application security program through a targetted set of standards, education and/or assessments based upon our understanding of their unique culture, process maturity and application security goals.
- We believe everyone has the right to secure software
- We believe everyone has the right to use a computer without fear
- We focus on the fix
- We believe developer education is a key means to achieving better security
- We believe increased awareness of security risks and mitigations will result in a healthier software ecosystem
- We believe 3rd party assessments of software can be used to keep development teams honest with themselves and their users
- We believe that can add the most value when our customers see us as a trusted advisor to improve security long term
- We believe in measuring and holding ourselves accountable to customer satisfaction in our services and products
- We believe in empowering our employees to learn and develop their skills
- We believe in an environment of trust and open communication amongst all members of the organization
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Zurich
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Istanbul
I found myself having to go to Istanbul to meet with a customer and due to complicated rules of international chihuahua travel, I had to go alone. The plan was to leave home on a Wednesday, arrive in Istanbul on Thursday, meet with my customer on Friday (hopefully without too much jet lag), and then I had a day to myself on Saturday to see the city. After that I was to fly to Portugal, work from Lisbon for a few days and then meet the family, one week after I had departed, when we would all reunite in Portugal.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Getting Results
My friend J.D. Meier has written a new book focused on how to be more effective, entitled Getting Results.
I came to Getting Results with a history of effectiveness and success. I had a solid sense of what I felt were the best ways to get things done, a set of process and principles that had worked well for me over many years. I am a process guy, a details guy and a lover of great strategy. I sweat the small stuff and I look at the big picture in order to guide myself and my organization to maximum results. Then I met JD...
I started with JD on a project to build security guidance for the ASP.NET development platform. A huge undertaking that involved discovering, consuming, and analyzing a huge amount of information from a huge amount of sources both written and verbal and then turning that into specific, contextual, prescriptive guidance for Microsoft developers. The goal was nothing less than to change the way in which web applications were written on the Microsoft platform. In order to make consumers more secure, the applications needed to be more secure. In order to make the applications more secure, developers needed to know what to do. That's where JD and team came in. What I saw in the course of this project, changed my view on how to get things done. JD accomplished what seemed impossible. In too little time, with too little resources, with a staggering amount of chaos to deal with, JD coaxed the team into writing a masterpiece. I couldn't see how it was done, but I was curious. Luckily for me I had the opportunity to work with JD on a number of other projects over the course of several years. I learned the process as it was developed and maybe even had a chance to contribute to it a little here and there. Whether I had any impact on it or not, it had a huge impact on me.
Before I explain what I learned, I want to set some context to explain how I used to get results. I was a huge believer in up-front planning. For a new project I would spend a lot of time designing and planning what needed to get done, how it would get done, when it would get done, who would do it and in what order. I was a master of this style. I could plan a complex project with a dozen team members and have an 18 month plan with all of the tasks laid out to the day and then we could execute to that plan so that 18 months from the start we had accomplished exactly what I had laid out at the start. Impressive right? Well, not really. I learned, the hard way, that I was focusing on the wrong things. I was focusing on tasks and activities. I was focusing on what got done, which I thought were the results, but I was neglecting the real results. Most importantly, I had the wrong assumptions. I assumed that a rigorous planning process could remove risk. I assumed that I knew up-front what I wanted to accomplish. I assumed that my plan was helping me when it was actually a prison.
So what did I learn from JD and how did it change how I do things? What kind of a difference did it make? Here are the key lessons I learned, my most important take-aways:
- Focus on scenarios and stories. I'd always used scenarios and stories as a tool, but I hadn't used them correctly. They were something I considered, they were an input to my plan, just one more thing that mattered. What JD taught me is that they are the only thing that matters. If you get this one thing right you win. If you get it wrong you lose. Planning should be about determining the right scenarios and stories you want to enable. Execution is about making these scenarios and stories real. You know you are done, you judge your success, by measuring against these scenarios and stories. Everything else is a means to this end.
- Expose risk early, fail quickly. Planning is an exercise in risk discovery and mitigation. You plan so that you can create a path to success while imagining the pitfalls and avoiding them. Planning is a mental exercise, it is not doing, it is imagining. JD helped me realize that the world is too complex to plan for every possible problem and it is too complex for you to be able to plan the best possible path. I learned that I should be exploring and optimizing as I go instead of trying to do it all up front. If the price of failure is not extreme (lost lives, destroyed business) and I can afford the exploration, I discovered I am better off reducing my up-front planning and jumping into the 'doing' sooner. By 'doing' I can expose risks early and I can determine if my chosen path will fail so I can pick another. I think JD calls it "Prove the Path". I like to think that mistakes and failure are bound to happen and I'd rather discover it fast while I have the chance to correct than discover it too late when I'm over-committed.
- Ruthless effectiveness. I thought I was ruthless already. I thought I went after results like a Pit Bull and didn't let go till I'd chewed it to a pulp. I was right, but that's not the most effective path. Ruthless effectiveness isn't being a Pit Bull and never letting go. Ruthless effectiveness is knowing when something is good enough and knowing when it will never be good enough. Ruthless effectiveness is learning to let go. I am a perfectionist, I like things to be more than good. I want them to be great, exceptional even. I can forget the rule of diminishing returns once I have my teeth into something. JD taught me to let a project go, to ship the book, to release the software when you've maximized its value and when it will make the most impact. Let go when there are external reasons to let go, don't let your own internal attachment cause you to hang on to something too long. It felt crazy to me when I first saw it, almost irresponsible. But it works. Its a ruthless focus on results. Nothing personal.
I'm sure your take-aways from Getting Results will be different from mine. We are all different, have different goals and are all in different places in regards to our abilities and motivations to be effective. There is so much in this guide, it has so much to offer, that I think anyone who reads it will get something out of it. If you are lucky, it may even change your life like it did mine.