I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
A suggested New Year’s resolution: be more curious
When I was growing up, my Dad and my uncles were always working on cars and motorbikes. This was partly through need: they didn’t have much money and they had to travel for work, studies and family life, so fixing a car using spare parts, ingenuity and improvisation was an essential skill. They also enjoyed it: it was as much of a hobby as a necessity.
It was not a practice I ever acquired the skill or the appetite for. I was much more interested in reading books than getting my hands covered in grease and oil. I enjoyed spending time with my Dad and Uncles as they struggled to fit strange shaped pieces of metal into strange shaped spaces, and as they scoured scrap yards to find an old car with the right part. But I never really understood what they were doing.
On the 2025 to-do list: figure out AI agents
Recent years have seen waves of AI innovation breaking faster than we can figure out good practice. Organisations around the world are working hard, not only to find ways to put AI to work, but to do so safely and responsibly. The AI to-do list often seems to be growing longer faster than we can strike items off it - but the only route to good practice is practice.
The advent of AI agents promises to add more items to the to-do list. The AI agent wave started cresting in 2024, and will break in 2025. Several major technology vendors and platforms already offer their customers the ability to build, configure and operate AI agents in an enterprise context, and the ability for consumers to build agents or to subscribe to existing agents, cannot be far behind (indeed, it is likely that, by the time this article is published, it will already be happening).
Celebrating our celebrations
If you celebrate Christmas, when did you put up your decorations this year?
In our house, we don’t normally put our decorations up for very long: about a week or so each side of Christmas. But this is not a normal year: we put our decorations up a week early, and I think that many other people did the same. This year (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) it felt like we needed those extra lights in the darkest time of the year. Even though the timing might have been a break with tradition, it felt important that we could still keep some traditions in some form, despite the challenges we face together.
The value of decoration was brought home to me even more this year by the extra effort made by the shops in the town where I live. For the past few years, many of these shops have had their windows painted by a handful of local companies, but this year even more seemed to join in. The picture at the top of this article shows just some of these paintings.