The personal blog of Sam Stokes.
I’m excited to be joining Eventual. I became a distributed systems engineer by accident. In 2010 I was working on a startup that suddenly got tens of thousands of users overnight, which was wonderful for our fundraising prospects and terrible for our product’s availability. I had to rapidly learn about horizontal scaling, rate limits, queues, backpressure, and database replicas. It was a crazy…
I’m publishing a subset of my private notes as a digital garden, as a home for unfinished thoughts, experiments, and random facts I find interesting. Easy to update and without the pressure to craft a polished essay, I hope it will complement this blog. I don’t necessarily expect anyone to read any of it, but it’d be lovely if somebody found something interesting there and started a conversation…
Over the holidays I rebuilt this blog from scratch. This isn’t the first time it’s needed major maintenance. For such a simple piece of software, it’s been surprisingly hard to keep operational for - at time of writing - 13 years. I thought a recap of its history would be interesting, if only as a cautionary tale for my future self. Since I started this blog I moved country, got married, became a…
What should the engineering team of an early-stage startup care about? Nimbleness, learning, sustainable speed.
As well as software, I also make cocktails. I got into it a few years ago, and by now it’s become a fully grown hobby, as evidenced by the entire kitchen shelf given over to bottles, and the ongoing invasion of my fridge by Mason jars of syrups and infused spirits. (Luckily my roommate considers that an acceptable price to pay for having an onsite bartender!) One question I often get asked is:…
"Speed vs quality" is a false choice in product development. Sometimes the best way to run fast is to be confident in your footing.
Ever been in a conversation like this? Engineer: “We’re going to have to cut feature X if we want to launch on time. It’ll take two months to build, but the deadline’s in a month.” Product manager: “That’s a shame - our competitors have that feature. I thought you demoed it last week?” Engineer: “That was just a prototype. We can’t ship it to users.” Product manager: “Why not? It looks awesome,…
I don’t like discussions about quality in software. Don’t get me wrong. I want to build software I can be proud of. I want to be part of teams that build great products. I aspire to craftsmanship. What I dislike is the word “quality”, and how it tends to polarise conversations. Quality is subjective A lot of factors go into software quality. Good software is fast. Good software is maintainable,…
When people who program want to convey to others the joy and satisfaction we find in our craft, we often liken it to doing magic. The analogy evokes a sense of empowerment, possibility and freedom. But I think comparing programming to magic actually does unintended harm, because it has another connotation: that programming is a mystical ability, something you are born with, not something you can…
What is programming like? We in the software profession have done a terrible job of explaining to the public what it is that we do. Everyone has interacted with a teacher or a doctor. There are TV shows about lawyers, cops, even government officials. However warped our impression of their day-to-day, we can relate to these professions. TV depicts programmers as modern-day wizards, socially aloof,…