Healthchecks at scale.
October 27, 2019.
A couple days ago at Stripe's weekly incident review, we started a discussion on a topic that is always surprisingly controversial: healthchecks. I've been thinking about them since and have written up some related thoughts.
An Elegant Puzzle by the numbers, five months later.
October 23, 2019.
An Elegant Puzzle was released on May 20th, 2019. In June I summarized what I learned writing the book, which says what I have to say about creating the book. Instead of retreading that material, I wanted to recap An Elegant Puzzle by the numbers.
Founding Monocle Studios.
October 22, 2019.
Waiting to hear if I would be hired by Yahoo! in 2008, Luke Hatcher and I founded Monocle Studios. Between June 14th and November 7th, we designed and released our iOS game touchDefense. Unlike the stroy of Digg V4, this story has no relevance. However, it's a period I personally look back on rather fondly.
Nobody cares about quality.
October 12, 2019.
You’re grabbing coffee with a coworker, and they’re caught deep in a rant loop, "Nobody cares about quality. They _say_ they care, but they don’t care." You helpfully decide to snap them out of the rant by providing some counter-examples, measuring your memories of the last few months and recounting some examples of slowing down for quality. Moments later, your contribution to the conversation is an easily traversed speed bump as the rant metastasizes, "They just don’t care."
A forty year career.
October 8, 2019.
The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream.