Product management in infrastructure engineering.
February 6, 2018 Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. Many of the infrastructure engineer teams I’ve been a part of have struggled to make the transition from maintenance to innovation, and I wanted to write down some of the ideas that we’re exploring to ease this shift.
Global secondary indexes.
January 30, 2018 At work we’ve been planning the next phase of our storage infrastructure, and a big part of that conversation has been around global secondary indexes a technique used by horizontally scalable datastores like Cassandra. While I was super comfortable nodding along, I wasn’t sure I actually understand the concept particularly well, so I’ve spent some time learning more about them, and wrote up some notes.
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.