The leveraged leadership of a calm calendar
I once worked closely with two VPs of Engineering with very different calendars. One had a packed calendar, often double- or triple-booked…
ktheory
The personal blog of Aaron Suggs
Latest posts
Task-relevant maturity: a lens for effective management
Have you ever wished that your manager would give you more autonomy and responsibility in some areas, and more direction and support in…
Vision before goals
I love this aphorism about visionary leadership paraphrasing Saint-Exupéry: “Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or…
Useful models: the barbell strategy
The barball strategy, popularized by Nassim Taleb, is a way to navigate risk/reward tradeoffs when you’re skeptical about the accuracy the…
Access-oriented DB design: avoiding the tech debt of normalized schemas
Choosing an appropriate data store and schema design is an important early decision for web development projects. A common convention is to…
A new model for social energy
I find the traditional introversion / extraversion spectrum used in Myers-Briggs personality test to be inadequate to understand my social…
What I used to believe about happiness
I used to believe that satisfaction could be found. I was a treasure hunter seeking an elusive location, charting waypoints along the…
Anatomy of a Job Search
Last December, I started a new role at a small, family-owned e-comm company. Two months later, my manager (the founder / CEO) and I realized…
Leading for proficiency versus creativity
I recently finished The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, and one of the final points was a flash of clarity for me. Coyle contrasts leading for…
A paradigm for developer productivity
In Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he observed that fields of study grows more complex until a key insight radically…
How to invest in documentation
I have a new interview on the DX Fieldnotes blog: How to Champion Investments to Improve Documentation. Brook Perry at DX did a great job…
3 ways to construct a narrative
Humans constantly construct narratives to make sense of a messy reality. If a new product launch went well, we could say it was because of…
Handy iOS Shortcuts
I love a good low-code productivity hack. Here are some of my favorite iOS shortcuts that make my life slightly easier. Easy after-school…
Left ditch, right ditch
A useful mental model I recently learned is enumerating the ‘left ditch’ and ‘right ditch’ solutions. Imagine we’re steering a vehicle along…
6 metrics for system observability
A recent theme of my work has been elevating metrics that focus and align small teams towards healthy business outcomes. I view this through…
Gratitude — 2021
This is the eve of Thanksgiving in the US, an occasion to reflect on what we’re grateful for. This year, I’d like to share my gratitude…
Types of Analysis
One of the more powerful concepts I’ve found is considering which type of analysis to apply to the challenge at hand. It’s been especially…
Completed staff work and Commander’s intent
Recently, I’ve found 2 leadership techniques particularly helpful. They’re both highly leveraged: they empower those around me to work…
Incident anecdote: The one with the weird A/B test
I appreciate reading stories of how complex software systems fail and the hard-earned lessons to make them more resilient. Here is another…
Personal productivity advice
Two colleagues recently asked me for personal productivity advice. I suspect one of them even gave me the Disco compliment: Aaron Suggs…
Resiliency generator
Below is the mental model I use when designing or reviewing web services to fail gracefully. It’s useful to enumerate common failure types…
Team values
Every team has values that guide their work. Of course, I like to write down some aspirational values, preferably in a charter. Here are…
Incident anecdote: the one where memcached crashed
I appreciate reading stories of how complex software systems fail and the hard-earned lessons to make them more resilient. In fact, one of…
Build vs. Buy wisdom from Apple and Amazon
I published Guiding principles for build vs. buy decisions on LeadDev as part of their Technical Decision Making series. Here’s the…
Culture of Code podcast
Felix Thea interviewed me recently for his new Culture of Code podcast. It begins with a bit of biography about my early sysadmin and…
Reading List (Feb-May 2021)
Here’s a log of audiobooks I’ve listened to recently, with some notes. Nonfiction Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah…
When to ship
There’s a crucial moment in platform engineering projects when you decide it’s ready to ship. For large projects (say, more than 1 year of…
Development environment trade-offs
My team has been discussing the role of various test and development environments. We’d like to provide guidance for what developers should…
Capacity testing: key metrics for success
A friend recently asked how to set better capacity testing goals for their tech team. We agreed we needed to get more specific about what…
Less painful roadmap reviews
The Glossier Tech team wrapped up our annual roadmap exercise earlier this year. It takes a lot of time and attention from the team…
Flex time and the 80% rule
While reviewing how I’ve spent my time recently, I stumbled into a practice to better ensure I have sufficient flexible time for…
Reading list
In mid-2020, I got an Audible subscription as a substitute for doomscrolling through social media. It turns out I enjoy listening to books…
Bento: Beyond Near Term Orientation
In January, I joined the Bento Society as a weekly practice in long-term thinking. The society is born of Yancey Strickler’s book This Could…
Choosing software vendors well
If you follow the strategy of avoiding undifferentiated heavy lifting, you’ll inevitably integrate with many software vendors. For example…
Vendor Relationship HOWTO
Creating and sustaining vendor relationships can be a highly leveraged skill for software engineering teams. But there’s little guidance or…
Interview at StaffEng
This interview originally appeared on StaffEng. I wanted to share it here as well. Tell us a little about your current role: where do you…
Exemplary Pull Requests
A well-crafted GitHub pull request can be a powerful way to show others how to extend and maintain a component. These ‘Exemplary’ PRs…
Energy and Optimism
In late 2019, I was burnt out in my Director of Engineering role. I spent several sessions with a career coach outlining my professional…