Have you ever watched a multi-million-dollar digital transformation project choke out because someone in procurement wanted to save $1,200 on a licence key?

I call the antidote the Full O’Fruit Strategy. I explain it with the level 12 dragon’s lair analogy: You had the gold for enchanted mithril plate, but procurement insisted on budget-friendly, participation-trophy vendor trash to save a few coppers.

We’ve all had the following crispy death moments, corpse-running our enterprise back to ground zero. In my latest article, I give three suggestions on how to save on repair bills, stop solving level 9 enterprise problems with cantrips, and breathe easier after decoupling yourself from the minimum viable procurement strategy that’s causing your teams to look on LinkedIn Jobs (which is not something we wish on anyone).

Let’s talk illusion magic, shoestring budgets, the engineering bay of the Millennium Falcon, and classic 90s Cisco IOS licensing matrices. If you’ve ever stared at a console prompt at 3:00 AM waiting for a blocked feature set, this one is for you. Read More …

Fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons is quite the lesson in technical debt.

Back in 1974, Elf was a class. That is a hard-coded dependency. It was an MVP that shipped, but five years later, when a user inevitably wanted a Dwarven Wizard, the backend required a massive re-architecture. Fast forward to 3rd Edition, and the vendor delivered an over-engineered SAP implementation where calculating a grapple check requires a small, expensive army of consultants.

If you’ve ever had to sit through a digital transformation presentation while wondering if your legacy stack is going to survive the quarter, I’ve mapped the history of the world’s most popular role-playing game to your corporate agony. It covers everything from premature optimisation to the very modern mistake of trying to vendor-lock a user base that understands good vs. evil and does complex probability math for fun.

Have a read. And next time you’re in a strategic alignment meeting, ask yourself: where is your Elf? Read More …

Is LitRPG just a guilty pleasure, or does it actually mean something? Let’s get a little more profound on this shower thought. This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on LitRPG: its past, how to write it, and why it keeps us coming back. LitRPG isn’t just about power-ups and progress bars. It taps into something deeper. Why do these stories hit so hard? Let’s autopsy why this genre is fundamental fantasy rather than a fad. Missed the earlier parts? Introduction There are a few genres that are experiencing break-out success, and with good reason. They scratch an underserved niche and, if done well, expand that niche into a chasm of readership that becomes a defining success. Romantasy is a great example, but we’re here to talk about LitRPG. You’ll still never pry Paladin’s Grace from my hands, but I will Read More …