Chad's thoughts about life, programming, and working as a software engineer
Often when coming home from a conference, I have a notebook (in Goodnotes ) full of notes taken from all the talks I attended. This was not that kind of conference for me. I didn't attend many sessions at Datadog DASH . Not for lack of trying, though. The conference rooms were generally too small for the crowd, so more than once a talk I wanted to attend was full by the time I got to the door. I…
I'm now at my second company using Temporal . At Smartrr , Temporal helped us with synchronization problems between Shopify and our systems that had the usual failure modes of distributed systems. When I joined Convergint , I brought that experience with me and started seeing "Temporal-shaped problems" again. My team has since started using Temporal for our synchronization jobs while helping our…
I've been attending DevOps Days in Birmingham, Alabama since its inception and have enjoyed being a part of this small tech community over the years. Last year I tried my hand at giving my first ever conference talk , which received a pretty nice reception. This year, I submitted a talk to share my experience applying my core engineering tenants at my current employer, a startup called Smartrr .…
This year was my third year to attend DevOpsDays Birmingham, AL . The first year I attended, I was invited by a friend that was acquainted with one of the organizers. I was invited to come to the speakers' dinner despite not giving a talk, which was a great experience for me. Conversations at this dinner helped me realize the people giving talks were primarily speaking from their lived experience…
After giving my talk at DevOpsDays Birmingham in 2023 , I was invited to appear on two podcasts to discuss Platform Engineering further! The questions helped me to think more deeply about some things, such as how process, team topologies, and platform engineering are deeply intertwined. These podcast episodes have been available for a while, but wanted to share them here as well for posterity! I…
One of the key traits of a senior engineer and especially a staff+ engineer is being self-directing . A trick I have used for years to do my best work and reduce the burden on my coworkers is to review my own work. Reviewing your own work means taking off your "author" hat and putting on your "reviewer" hat, inspecting it from a detached perspective and evaluating its merits, style, and other…
In April 2023, I gave my first ever public conference talk at DevOps Days in Birmingham, Alabama . I shared the lessons I have learned in my first year at Sotheby's about how to make Platform Engineering work. It was an honor to be chosen as one of the few speakers at the event. What follows is the content I used for the talk, along with the slides I used to present. Here's a recording of the…
Sometimes people joke that we become software engineers because we "like computers more than people" - the implication within this being that we'd rather avoid talking with people as much as possible. The truth, however, is that we must instead develop these supposedly dreaded skills if we expect to succeed to any meaningful degree as a software engineer. I guess the joke is on us 😅. As a…
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson is a needed deep dive into the world of software engineering leadership outside choosing the management career path. As I read this book, I am beginning my journey into Staff-level engineering, so it is particularly timely for me. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to software engineers looking to grow beyond the Senior…
As a software engineer, one of the first principles of your profession is that you never stop learning. Technology, and software engineering specifically, is evolving at such a rapid pace that the skills you learn one year may not continue to serve you in the years to come. As your career progresses, your arsenal of skills will need to adapt to new positions, new environments, and new challenges.…
Twice a year, the consulting agency ThoughtWorks publishes a document they call the Technology Radar . In this document, they describe trends in tools, techniques, languages/frameworks, and platforms that they are seeing in their work with their clients. They break down their observations along 4 categories: Adopt, Trial, Assess and Hold. These documents are released twice a year, and I generally…
I've been writing Rest APIs in Node.js, Ruby, and PHP for nearly 8 years. Over time, I've experimented with different frameworks, tools, and practices, all with the goal to simplify both the development and consumption of these services. At work, we're largely beginning to settle on Node.js across the company, so in this article I want to share what I feel are some of the best tools and practices…
I have had many false-starts with blogging. Most of the time I start out tinkering with various front-end javascript frameworks , testing build tooling , and trying to come up with fancy ideas prior to bootstrapping the blogging pieces. As time went on I would tell myself I would eventually get around to building the blogging portions of the site, but when push came to shove it never became a…
Building this site in the open. This is the first post.