2024 in review.

career (37), blog (18), year-in-review (6)

Hi.

Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

Goals

Evaluating my goals for this year and decade:

  • [Completed] Write at least four good blog posts each year.

    Layers of context, Useful tradeoffs are multi-dimensional, Notes on how to use LLMs in your product, ?

  • [Completed] Write another book about engineering or leadership.

    I did this in either 2023 or 2024, as I released The Engineering Executive’s Primer this year, and finishing writing it late last year. Either way, it’s complete for the decade

  • [Mixed] Do something substantial and new every year that provides new perspective or deeper practice.

    ?

  • [In progress] 20+ folks who I’ve managed or meaningfully supported move into VPE or CTO roles at 50+ person or $100M+ valuation companies.

    This is a decade goal ending in 2029, where I increased the goal in 2022 from 3-5 to 20. A strict count is at 7 today, so I think I’m on track for 20 by end of decade

  • [Completed] Work towards a clear goal for physical exercise. (Hitting the goal isn’t important.)

    ?

todo: decide if I want to revamp goals again, lol

set goals for next decade in 2019, reworked those goals in 2022

Published Engineering Executive’s Primer

My third book was published in March, The Engineering Executive’s Primer. I wrote up notes on publishing it with O’Reilly, and I’m altogether very happy to have written it, published it. I’m also glad that work is in the past, rather than the present, as it’s a fair amount of work to juggle with a full-time job.

Relatively to my last two books, this is a bit more of a niche topic, so my mental model for sales is that they’d likely be a bit lower So far, sales were around [todo: find some sort of units sold number] up through end of last month. [todo: add some sort of analysis, e.g. this is roughly similar to initial sales for my first two books, or it’s down a bit or whatever]

I’m doing my best not to gauge this book on sales, but rather on the idea that useful writing can advance the state of the industry by reaching decision makers within the industry. In this case, if it helps more folks navigate into executive roles where they lead effective organizations, then it’s a success independently of how many copies it sells.

Other book updates

I don’t have too many other book updates:

  • probably hit 1,000 stars on amazon for Staff Engineer this year
  • Both books continued to sell fairly well. I believe An Elegant Puzzle passed 100k copies sold either late last 2023 or early 2024 (the sales data I get is not particularly high granularity), which is a nice number. Staff Engineer is also doing well, passing 75k copies sold this year
  • I wrote the High-Context Triad which I view as an additional set of chapters for a second edition of Staff Engineer whenever I get to that project, probably whenever I next have a few months between jobs. Of those chapters, I think Useful tradeoffs are multi-dimensional and Layers of context are particularly useful
  • I’ve been pulling together notes and writing on engineering strategy, which has a real chance of turning into my next book, but there’s no guarantee on these things, e.g Infrastructure Engineering hasn’t made any progress in the past 18 months or so because I’ve been working on other things

Public speaking, etc

Generally, I am not very focused on public speaking, but my stance on this topic changes the years when I publish a new book, and I did quite a bit of speaking, writing, podcast attendee-ing, and so on.

Was featured on:

Gave talks at:

If you’re wondering why I do more speaking on the years I publish new books, it’s pretty straightforward: it helps sell more copies of the books, and books live on momentum. A good start in the first year contributes forever to its sales, as long as it’s a timeless book (“engineering leadership”) rather than a timely one (“release about the current version of a database”). It’s potentially worth noting that these connections came from writing over the course of years and working in the Silicon Valley tech industry, it’s not the case that any publisher can or will connect you to a distribution platform. You have to do that work yourself.

That said, it does get a lot easier with repetition. I had no idea what I was doing after releasing Puzzle, but it was pretty much autopilot for Primer. Autopilot doesn’t mean it’s easy, it’s still a lot of work, but there’s a big difference between doing the work and figuring out how to do the work.

Videos

I’ve been playing around with creating YouTube videos for my conference talks. My approach is pretty basic: whenever I give a talk, I record a practice run ahead of time, and then post it online after I’ve given the talk at the conference. I don’t ever expect my YouTube channel to go anywhere–hence the low production values–but I do think it’s worthwhile to keep recordings as conference videos often disappear. Worst case, this means I have some recording of my talks since late 2023.

Personal stuff

  • kid is in SF’s mess of a kindergarten application process
  • skin cancer – all good now, but scary at the time. One of the downsides of these sorts of things is that they start more aggressively treating everything else, which is a bit frustrating. Strange to be almost 40, running 4 miles twice a week, playing basketball for 2 hours a week, and lifting weights 1-2 times and getting treated for the same number of medical issues as a 60 year old…
  • monarchmoney – first time I’ve had good cash flow visibility for my own finances (working for private companies doesn’t make this particularly easy)
  • finished invisalign – great but took took long

Reading

The profession-adjacent related reading I did this year (by which I mean, most of my reading is fiction but I don’t track that

I read a lot more than this, but don’t track my fiction reading)

Added:

  1. Financial Accounting, 11th Edition by Weygandt, Kimmel, and Kieso
  2. Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky
  3. The Big Score by Michael S. Malone
  4. How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
  5. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
  6. Chip War by Chris Miller
  7. Practical TLA+: Planning Driven Development by Hillel Wayne (I thought that I’d read this previously, but I’m pretty sure I’d just bought the Kindle version and struggled to get into it in that format. I actually read it this time as a paperback book.)
  8. Architecture Modernization by Nick Tune with Jean-Georges Perrin
  9. Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
  10. Accounting Made Simple by Mike Piper
  11. Partnership Accounting - Financial Accounting by Robert Steele (This is a Udemy course, not a book, but very much professional content.)
  12. Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
  13. Super Founders by Ali Tamaseb
  14. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
  15. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T. Munger
  16. Domain-Driven Software Distilled by Vauhgn Vernon
  17. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Christensen, Allworth, and Dillon
  18. Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
  19. Building Green Software by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, and Sara Bergman
  20. What You Do Is You Who Are by Ben Horowitz
  21. Read Write Own by Chris Dixon
  22. Co-intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick
  23. The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
  24. The End of Loyalty by Rick Wartzman
  25. You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte
  26. Build by Tony Fadell