Mail bag for December 2019: when your team wants your job, personal brand, and service registries.
December 9, 2019.
Thanksgiving week started well, and then took a hard pivot towards influenza, which meant that I haven’t had much energy to write or think over the past bit. I did get a handful of interesting questions emailed in though, so I figured I’d do an email grab bag of three anonymized questions that came in over the past week and an answer to each.
Maintaining platform-product fit.
November 25, 2019.
Recently I reread Steve Yegge's 2011 Google Platforms Rant, which states "the Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood," arguing that APIs are good to the extent that the folks developing them depend on their quality.
"How to successfully design organizational processes"
November 23, 2019.
The first pierce I wrote in 2019 was about good process being evolved rather than designed in a one-off fashion, which served as the basis for a talk I gave at SFELC's January 2019 conference.
"Do engineering managers need to be technical?" in Increment.
November 22, 2019.
The most recent issue of Increment came out, focusing on Teams, and I'm excited to get to cross the chasm and move from playing a small role in the founding of Increment to contributing a piece on whether engineering managers need to be technical.
Expanding on S[a-z]{3,} Reliability Engineer roles.
November 18, 2019.
One of my foundational learning experiences occurred in 2014, when I designed and rolled out Uber’s original Site Reliability Engineering role and organization. While I’d make many decisions a bit differently if I could rewind and try again, for the most part I’m proud when reviewing the reel of rewound memories.