Category Work

The Ghost in the SharePoint Farm

Tomiko and three IT colleagues investigate a ghostly apparition emerging from a SharePoint 2007 monitor in a dark server room, unaware of the glowing eyes beneath a desk.

Somewhere inside the International Monetary Fund, a SharePoint farm began behaving as though it were haunted. Servers failed, error messages offered little explanation, and the evidence stubbornly refused to agree with the documentation.

In this true story from the trenches of enterprise IT, Doc Tomiko and her colleagues follow a trail of increasingly improbable clues through the peculiar architecture of SharePoint 2007. Part technical detective story, part workplace comedy, and part homage to the great supernatural investigators of television, The Ghost in the SharePoint Farm demonstrates why troubleshooting is less about knowing all the answers than knowing which questions to ask.

Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house.

The Machine Can Write the Code. You Still Have to Know What the Hell You’re Doing.

A blue-and-black humanoid robot stands proudly beside an ornate wooden staircase that stops short of the second floor, while a frustrated architect examines blueprints on a folding table.

If artificial intelligence can write better code than most humans, why bother learning how to program? Because programming was never just about writing code. It was about understanding problems, challenging assumptions, testing solutions, and recognizing when a machine has done exactly what it was told—and gotten everything wrong. As AI makes software development faster and more accessible, computational literacy becomes more important, not less. Learning to program isn't about competing with the machines. It's about knowing what to ask them to build, whether the result works, and when to tell them to stop.