Tracy Bannon

It's the humans that matter...

Perseverance, the IRS, and Partnering

If you never know failure,. you will never know success.

#StraightTalk4Gov and sharing of experience stories is a passion for me. I’ve been thinking about the importance of learn fast/fail fast whether yesterday or earlier. We have a responsibility to share the stories that highlight culture building, organizational change, policy bending, and perseverance A few years ago I had the opportunity to collaborate with Aaron Francensconi, Amin Qazi, Rupesh Kumar and others at the IRS on adopting agile principles and growing a DevOps practice.

Faux Script Kiddie!

Why is it so easly to learn to hack?

A few weeks ago I dusted off my dog-eared copy of ”The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook” by Studdard and Pinto (Yes,I still prefer printed books though I now spring for a second e-version for when I’m traveling.). I’ve installed the most recent version of Burp Suite community edition and OWASP’s ZAP and decided to freshen up my ethical hacking/cyber-student skills. Of course, I am not probing public sites, but rather, using the ethical learning sites:

Distributed Everything

Why is it so easly to learn to hack?

A recent post by George Lawton on venturebeat.com highlighted insights by Gartner’s analysts on pressing trends for operationalizing business value (aka value stream/ mission delivery). The key take away is the need to address composability and “distributed everything.” I’ll add a personal “+1” to that assertion given my observations with my clients and federal sponsors. Growth in composable infrastructure is powered by cloud capabilities. Growth in composability of data and analytics is fueled by a few drivers: the need to harness and make use of the data available th enteprise already has, the need to deal with growing volumes of new data available to the enterprise, and the incorporation of multiple analytics techniques into all facets of software intensive systems.

Grace and Fairy Gardens

Hang in there, we are in this together

As I was thinking through messages to share with my amazing workmates and teams and fighting with the spell checker over how to even spell fairy/faery/fairey, I realized that all of my network, friends and family may find some joy in this post. As I head into the Easter weekend, starting with today, Good Friday, I find myself talking pause to reflect on more than our current world situation, but also on the past 18 months of dramatic change.

A Year Of Change For This Software Architect

2020. What a year of change this has been.

Tech Reflections When I started receiving congratulations messages on my work anniversary, it struck me just how fast the last 525,600 minutes have passed. So much has changed, and yet much remains the same. What has changed? After nearly 13 years, I left Deloitte Consulting, LLP to join the MITRE Corporation; I had honestly never thought that I would leave Deloitte. While I miss my friends and colleagues @ Uncle D’s, I’ve gained anew with MITRE.