It is not my job The job of a Staff+ IC (individual contributor) leader is murky at best. Even when I spoke about this in [the first event dedicated to Staff+ folks], I felt compelled to explain that “it is a job that can be different things at different times”. These differences can come from various sources: The stage the company is at when it hires/promotes Staff+ folks If you are the first or…
There are things that one never expects to get to do. I have talked about this on Twitter before but I still remember being a new immigrant who took a chance and quit college to come to the US, start over and merely dreamed of working tech. I have also talked about how I started in tech after college, how I never planned to be a DBA and it was all a ‘happy’ accident and a necessity of the time…
Tech, 10 yrs ago Back when I started in tech, the most common deployments were what is known as a LAMP stack. This was a kind of architecture that was simple to reason about. Also, we commonly deployed such a stack by either leasing servers from vendors like Softlayer and Rackspace, or by directly leasing space in datacenters and dealing with all the details of networking, cage space, cooling,…
The manager’s path I bought and read The Manager’s Path by the awesome Camille Fournier when it first came out. At the time, I was a senior Database Engineer aspiring to become a principal engineer in my organization. At SendGrid, principal engineer and principal engineer 2 are manager and director level roles respectively without having human direct reports. We had just overhauled the career…
This year has been a roller coaster. Speaking at Velocity This fall I got to speak about lessons learned scaling databases at the Velocity EU conference in London which was a blast. I got to try new things like high afternoon tea with some amazing women in tech and I basically spent the entire conference chatting with many humans I admire and respect. One great result from that is that I now also…
This post is by request from Baron Schwartz who has written about forming connections within his company, Vivid cortex I have been at SendGrid for nearly 7 years now and have been working remotely for 4 of those years. While SendGrid is not a ‘remote first’ company, it was distributed in multiple locations from the very beginning. Since the early days, leadership at SendGrid believed that we…
This week, the latest State of DevOps report by the team at DORA was released. There is a lot of conversations in various social media platforms on what makes an engineering team ‘successful’ and how to increase feature velocity in tech companies and the DORA report does not just rely on anecdotes but surveys the field using rigorous scientific methods and statistical constructs to back or debunk…
Hiring is hard. It really is. You are looking to add a new human to your team who will hopefully work with you for many months to come but you have about an hour, at best, to develop some strong opinions about how they will perform in the future. We spend way more time than that on vetting vendors, don’t we? I recently worked with my manager to double the headcount of my team which was both…
Note: This is post first appeared as part of the SysAdvent series of December of 2017 Databases can be hard. You know what’s harder? Choosing one in the first place. This is challenging whether you are in a new company that is still finding its product/market fit or in a company that has found its audience and is simply expanding the product offering. When building a new thing, one of the very…
Note: This is a repost of a blog post I wrote for Sendgrid’s blog in September of 2017 A year ago, Sendgrid was working hard towards SOC2 certification. Everyone was involved. There were stories on nearly every delivery team board with a SOC2 tag as we were all looking to be certified by the end of the third quarter. As you can imagine, being the person in charge of databases, there was definitely…
I never liked that term ‘remote’. Whether in relation to me or to colleagues. It is exclusionary. And betrays a sense of ‘otherness’ that I feel is unhealthy for team cohesion. I understand that not everyone finds it easy or productive to work mostly apart from daily, in person, social interaction. But success is an arm in arm effort and the strategies to build successful teams work regardless of…
In some ways it feels like this year flew by, in others like it was as long as an eternity. Looking back, it definitely surprises even me how many significant events have happened in these 12 months. I know one can say that about pretty much every year but it feels more pronounced this time. Without much ado, here is a recap of how this year has been. Team of one no more By the beginning of 2017,…
This post is a flight of ideas. Blame Charity getting my brain going This morning, I came to twitter to find this thread of tweets from the always awesome Charity majors. This got me thinking about how it seems many people in our field, and so many companies by consequence, have adopted the attitude that leadership comes from above. That you must have a certain title to be able to lead in your…
I have spoken before about how important it is for me and my team to make as many parts of the database stack match our larger infrastructure. One of the most crucial ways to do this is to make sure that not only are we deploying and managing databases using configuraton management, but that the cookbooks remain in lock step with changes our cookbooks at large move towards. When i first learned…
In case you don’t follow SysAdvent (in which case, why?? you are missing out on great content every year!), the post on December 6th this year was by Alice Goldfuss . I have tweeted a link to that post that day and since then my tweet has been quoted, responded to and the ensuing ‘conversation’ has been eyeopening. A lot of the response has been anger that an operations engineer is advocating for…
Note: This is inspired by Julia Evans’ recent post about …. capacity planning 😌 Ground rules RDBMS Yes..this post is geared for those of us who use MySQL with a single writer at a time and 2 or more read replicas. A lot of what I will talk about here applies differently, or not at all, to multi writer clustered datastores, although those also come with their own set of compromises and caveats.…
This post is inspired by quite a few great posts like this one by Ryn Daniels and Lara Hogan 2015 was a year of lots of changes and lots of growing for me, both professionally and personally. It also had a lot of firsts for me. Going remote Late in 2014, I announced to Sendgrid that I am about to move to South Florida where my husband has been working for months. Sendgrid, while distributed in…
Sensu for monitoring Here at Sendgrid we spent the last couple of years porting a lot of our service and host monitoring to Sensu . Its solid API support meant we could write all sorts of tooling around it. We also liked the idea of standalone, client side checks that push their status to the Sensu alerting queue asynchronously. If you are new to Sensu or haven’t ever read on it, this is a good…
The not-so-merry go round There is a lot of talk these days about burnout in our field. A lot of great initiatives to get us tech people to not hide it, not sweep it under the rug. This is a great start for a more honest conversation about the stresses we all deal with in this industry and yet, a lot of the examples I see of people trying to deal with it is through quitting their current gig,…
Alfred, csshx and terminalception I use Tmux usually but Tmux on the mac has not been playing nice with csshx for me. Something in the dark magic of perl broke with an error that looks like this Mar 5 08:58:42 silvias-MacBookPro.local perl[10828] : ImageIO: CGImageDestinationFinalize image destination must have at least one image 2015-03-05 08:58:42.473 perl5.18[10828:2436454]…