Experimenting with content and distribution.
January 27, 2018 I've been writing on this blog for over a decade, but I haven't experimented or changed things up for four or five years. This year I'm trying some new approaches to writing and distribution, and I wanted to share a bit about those goals.
Inclusion in the first shift.
January 23, 2018 Several years and an employer ago, I was interviewing a candidate for an engineering management role and asked them how they built diverse teams. They mentioned the pipeline problem and concisely summarized their experience: it’s hard. I knew it was a weak answer. And mine was uncomfortably similar.
Vulnerability.
January 20, 2018 Vulnerability is sharing more of who you are emotionally than people expect, and often more than they’re comfortable with hearing. If you read enough management books, you’ll get this sense that there is a skill called authenticity for you to learn, but I think it’s less something that you need to add, than having the courage and the willingness to put away some of your masks for a while.
The physics of Cloud expansion.
January 16, 2018 With many new technologies being released every year, it should get harder to place companies into their era, but I find it’s getting much easier. The staccato drumbeat of JavaScript frameworks has helped, but lately the best indicator has been which components are managed internally, and which have been moved to the cloud. Lately, the move from VMs to containers has fingerprinted companies as surely as the previous move from servers to VMs. It’s particularly interesting to think about how this trend is redefining the role of infrastructure engineering at companies that build on the cloud. How will the cloud’s steady advance shape our future work, and what can we do today to prepare for those changes?
Async processing with sync semantics?
January 15, 2018 Lately I've been thinking more about, and particularly how you'd design a moderately complicated web application to rely exclusively on an immutable log.