April 16, 2020.
If you took a minute to think back and pick your favorite conference talk, I have no idea what it was about, but I bet the talk was designed to tell a story. Likewise, I bet your favorite book, even if it’s non-fiction, is lanced through by a crisp, continuous narrative. If you wanted to explain your best or worst job, I bet you’d start by telling a story that captures the experience.
April 11, 2020.
I've been using GCP's Cloud Run for a handful of projects recently, including staffeng.com, and have generally been really pleased with it. Now that I'm familiar with it, I can get all of this working for a new Python project in about twenty minutes...
April 9, 2020.
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply better against populations than people. In the case of Staff-plus engineers, career ladders paper over a number of distinct roles clustered under a single moniker.
April 5, 2020.
Slightly related to my notes on build versus buy decisions, I spent some time specifically getting a feel for Contentful over the weekend and have written up some notes here.
April 5, 2020.
A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for roughly thirty-two ascii characters in a particular sequence. Beyond the license, we'd still be responsible for operating the software and paying for the capacity to run it.