Mark Zuckerberg is in the middle of a coordinated-if-haphazard heel turn , removing tampons from mens’ rooms and welcoming slurs back to his platforms. This occurs while the neighborhood next to mine is still on fire, and his behavior stands in stark contrast to the imperative to love one another or die that is all around me. I connected with this take: [I]t is probably worth thinking about what…
In my talk Egoless Engineering I make the case that results are better when teams cooperate, that punching down and other forms of brilliant-jerkhood are actually dumb, and that leaders should reward curiosity and generosity. I think misery is a dumb strategy and I am encouraged that some folks have found this case compelling. Some of those who find the content compelling wish they could persuade…
I recently read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick . It was good! You should read it. I want to say this up front, since after some preamble I’m going to describe a Rube-Goldbergian attempt to poke petty holes in it. I don’t want the reader to lose sight of the big picture, which is that I was trying to do this in the spirit of the book. Which again, is pretty good. The Zeitgeist is a-Polterin’ How…
There were rumblings earlier this week that Alphabet executives mused about killing GCP . I think they probably won’t do it [1] . But as a side effect this has provoked yet another round of everyone pouring one out for the most beloved Google ex-feature ever, Google Reader . I miss the RSS world of the early 2000’s as much as anyone. I miss it almost as much as I miss McCarren Pool having no water…
Here are some links to recent work I’ve done elsewhere. Ship Small Diffs - I tried to transmute the anguish I feel looking at huge changesets into words. Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself - Getting youngfolk to listen to you is harder than I realized. Fourteen Months with Clojure - Going back to my Lisp roots here. The Push Train - Trying to frantically document some of the human…
Coda and I have been using Clojure to build Skyliner for the last fourteen months or so. I thought it might be a good idea to write down some of our experiences with this, for the benefit of others considering it for practical work. The beating heart of Skyliner, a deploy encoded as a finite state machine. Learning languages is easy, learning the idioms is less easy “Lisp has no syntax,” or so…
I’ve worked with deploy systems in the past that have a prominent “rollback” button, or a console incantation with the same effect. The presence of one of these is reassuring, in that you can imagine that if something goes wrong you can quickly get back to safety by undoing your last change. But the rollback button is a lie. You can’t have a rollback button that’s safe when you’re deploying a…
Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity. Toolchains for building code in general are widely available, relatively older, and they also happen to be closest at hand when you’re getting started. The tendency, then, is to pick some command line tools and work forwards from their affordances. Git provides methods for coping with every merge problem conceivable. It also…
Note : This was a post for Skyliner, which was a startup I co-founded in 2016. The post is recreated here since it makes some good points and was reasonably popular. But be advised the startup it describes is now defunct (we sold ourselves to Mailchimp in 2017). I’ve been around long enough to see production releases done a few different ways. My first tech job began back when delivering software…
I was speaking on a panel the other day that was handed the topic, “the challenges of balancing data-light product bets vs purely data driven incremental improvements.” Camille Fournier was also a panelist and wrote up her thoughts here . Camille’s take (which I think is right) is that even if you don’t have data to work from, you can still approach projects analytically. For me, the process of…
Please note that Roberto Medri is a coauthor on this post. Albert Wenger has been one of the VC’s I most admire for a long time. He was very present in the early days at Etsy, and sat in giving counsel on some, uh, significantly astray engineering team meetings. Albert is a smart, data-driven guy whose values roughly align with my own. That said, I have an axe to grind with his latest post, Don’t…
In response to Kellan’s musing about push notifications on twitter, Adam McCue asked an interesting question: @kellan @mcfunley what's the best way to do this? — Adam McCue (@mccue) November 25, 2015 I quickly realized that fitting an answer into tweets was hopeless, so here’s a stab at it in longform. How would we do this? Let’s come up with a really simple way to figure this out for the…
I gave a spoken word version of Choose Boring Technology at OSCON in Portland last week. Here are the slides:
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data Driven Products Now! if Kellan had not been there to…
Here’s a video of me doing a slightly-amended version of my Data Driven Products talk at the Lean Startup Conference back in December. I am told I upspeak ? You be the judge.
I saw lizTheDeveloper’s post about technical leadership at Simple and I realized that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. I hope to persuade you that there are a number of systemic biases working against a healthy technical career path. I don’t think that they’re insurmountable, and I don’t disagree with Liz’s post. But I’ve never heard of a company clearing all of these hurdles at…
Back when I was at Etsy, I did a presentation internally about the craft of sizing opportunities. I finally got around to writing a public incarnation of that talk. Here it is:
The person on build rotation, or the nightly schlimazel I suppose, went into a hot 5’x8’ closet containing an ancient computer. This happened after everyone else had left, so around 8:30PM. Although in crunch time that was more like 11:30PM. And we were in crunch time at one point for a stretch of a year and a half. “That release left a mark,” my friend Matt used to say. In a halfhearted attempt…
Here’s a presentation I gave about how Etsy wound up using Scalding for analysis. Given at the San Francisco Cascading Meetup .
For four months ending in early 2011, I worked on team of six to redesign Etsy’s homepage. I don’t want to overstate the weight of this in the grand scheme of things, but hopes flew high. The new version was to look something like this: There were a number of methodological problems with this, one of our very first web experiments. Our statistics muscles were out of practice, and we had a very…