Staff engineer communities
There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing.
Blog - No Idea Blog
Posts about things.
Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 5 days ago and current, but nothing has been published for 5 years.
Latest posts
How many vacation days does it take to change a lightbulb?
I stopped using a todo list a while back. I put tasks into my calendar as meetings, then reschedule those meetings if I need to. Having all of the work already assigned a time slot (sometimes far in the future) means that when I have nothing scheduled, I don’t feel like I should be taking an item off the todo list: it’s genuinely free time. I was surprised by the wave of emotion I felt when I…
I love Advent of Code
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Wrote some things!
Some recent writing: thinking of our future selves as stakeholders, leadership on the IC track, what a “real engineer” acts like, and the very exciting 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.
Talks I like: Cultivating Architecture by Birgitta Boeckeler
Cultivating Architecture by Birgitta Boeckeler describes how to give teams autonomy without causing chaos.
Being Kind
in most situations, people being nice is unremarkable, just a reasonable default. Being kind though, that’s a game changer.
Project time without focus time
Why learning Android dev has been the perfect pandemic hobby.
Conference Report: O'Reilly Software Architecture NYC 2020
I went to the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in NYC last week. I enjoyed it a lot but I was surprised by how little it overlapped with production/reliability conferences. Here’s my conference report.
Surviving the Organisational Side Quest
The most frustrating but most useful work can be unblocking blocked projects. But it’s sometimes an epic adventure to understand why it’s blocked.
Tuning the distraction machine
I've been working on how to make my phone less of a distraction machine. Here’s some stuff I’ve found helpful.
Can somebody volunteer to take notes?
The meeting is about to begin and the moderator asks "Can somebody take notes?". And then *nobody says a word*. Should you volunteer?
Nine takeaways from the DevOps report
I like the DevOps report because it brings us actual statistics on what’s making software engineering organisations successful. Here’s nine things I’m thinking about after reading this year’s report.
Yes if: My first post on the Squarespace engineering blog
I love when engineering groups share what they’ve learned, and Squarespace’s engineering blog was one of the things that drew me to the company. So I’m really excited to have my first blog post up there: The Power of “Yes, If”.
Lightning talk: Nobody could have predicted this
What can you tell from an RFC or design document about how a system will fail?
Conference Report: The Lead Developer NYC 2019
I went to The Lead Developer New York and I loved it.
Conference Report: SRECon Americas 2019
SRECon Americas was in Brooklyn this year! SRECon has always emphasised the human side of reliability and I appreciated the focus on learning and teaching, psychological safety and avoiding burnout, as well as a bunch of tech topics around keeping sites running.
Working from sofa
Can other people do focused work from desks? I’ve never gotten the hang of it.
Google Slides has an Unsplash integration!
Google Slides and I have spent a lot of time together, but our relationship is challenged every time I work with images. Until now!
Three things that went well in 2018
This isn't a full 2018 retrospective, but I wanted to write about three things I'm happy about from the year, all of which involved doing stuff that scared me.
"I wouldn't start from here". How to make a big technical change.
So much of the time, we have a vision for where we’d like our technology to be, but it sure would be nice to not start from where we are. Whether we’re adding support for IPv6, deprecating Nagios, introducing a DevOps culture or moving to microservices, we’ve got the same problem ahead of us: how can we make enough people care?