Recent content in Many, many, blog posts by Alex Kessinger (frequent inventor of words). on Rumproarious
I was a front-end engineer before the iPhone existed. As apps increased in use, a thought occurred to me: what if websites just… disappear? What does that mean for my job? My gut reaction was I guess it’s time to learn Objective-C. I tried it. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t my world. Cut to today, Websites didn’t disappear. But more importantly, I realized my job was never…
Karpathy recently posted about using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases — collecting raw sources into a directory, having an LLM “compile” them into a wiki of interlinked markdown files, and viewing the whole thing in Obsidian. He followed it up with an “idea file,” a gist you can hand to your agent so it builds the system for you. This is a great idea, I’ve been…
After a long hiatus, David and I are bringing the StaffEng podcast back. We’re back because our work is changing dramatically, weekly, and we want want to learn from folks who are riding this wave with us. You can read more here: We’re Back When we started the podcast back in 2021, we were exploring what it meant to be a Staff-plus engineer. We talked to practitioners about setting…
You want to get hard things done, and you want to tackle progressively bigger things. We all do. If you are reading this you chose to do a hard thing. You probably use hard work and elbow grease to do the job. While that kind of work is valuable, at a certain level of complexity, those tools loose their usefulness. And yet, you still want to do the hard thing. This is a good news/bad news deal.
Once you’ve decided to adopt a new view of safety, and want to help an organization change, how do you know if you are changing anything? How do you know if you are successful? Especially considering the total organization overhaul you hope to achieve. It can be useful to identify some markers somewhere between nothing, and total success. What are some markers that demonstrate we are on our…
From my tiny West Berkeley apartment, with my family asleep upstairs, I typed into the search box: “python Berkeley”. It was 2015 and for the past 6 years, I commuted hours a day all over the Bay Area. My goal was eventually to create a startup. But, My latest gig had imploded and I was tired and mis-wanting to be a startup founder was reason number one . While I still enjoyed programming, I…
Writing down remediation items is a seductively simple outcome for a post-mortem. It’s satisfying. “Yea, there was an issue but if we do these 3 things, we will be better off”. It’s all wrapped up in a nice bow. Although remediation feels like the right outcome, it’s not the most powerful reason to do a post-mortem. The most valuable part of a post-mortem is the ability to radiate…
Software is key to a growing number of businesses. Which means working with software safely isn’t just prudent, it’s existential to many. The wrong kind of accident could wipe you out. Investigating incidents is a technique many businesses use to remediate issues that led to accidents in the first place. They hope it will help them reduce the number and scope of accidents in the future. While…
(A hypothetical dependency graph that led to a systemic failure in AWS us-east-1 from @0xdabbad00) Like many, I was personally affected by the AWS outage last week. I was on-call, and was paged for a couple of reasons. While I was paged, I owe a lot to the infrastructure team I work with. They managed all of the issues I was paged for, and outside of a few spurious pages, I was mostly insulated…
Striving to be better, made me. Even though, it almost broke me. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to find a way to balance my daily duties and routines with my drive to be better and do better. Besides being a great time to be with family and friends, for me the time between Thanksgiving and New Years' allows me to burn through my inbox, collect my thoughts, maybe write.
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see…
Members of the SRE team explain how their engagement with the entire software lifecycle has enabled Google to build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world.
Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.
A group of researches who’ve studied the daily standup for over a decade summarize their research and provide recommendations for how to make standups more valuable.
Researchers studying software engineering often choose inappropriate methods. This chapter from, ‘Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering’, is intended to help folks understand how to choose the right methods.
When it comes to creating a start-up there’s prevailing wisdom. There’s even a school you can go to to learn it. But, for every company that does it “right”, there is one that does it their own way. One that is introspective and honest (ish). That other way is epitomized by Gimlet, the podcast company, at least if their podcast is any representation of how they work. I’ve…
Interviews provide a rich set of qualitative experiences to analyze, but they require a high level of effort to achieve high quality results. This paper provides recommendations based on available literature and the experience of the authors.
The Field Guide to Understanding ’Human Error’ will help you understand a new way of dealing with a perceived ‘human error’ problem in your organization. It will help you trace how your organization juggles inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures and expectations, suggesting that you are not the custodian of an already safe system.
Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s…
In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire.
In my professional roles the word engineer is in the title somewhere. For instance I’m currently a Principal Engineer at Stitch Fix, but I’ve been a Software Engineer, Front-end Engineer and so fourth over the years. The word engineer isn’t really apt for what I do though. In the last year I found a new promising word: Symmathecist. I learned about it from this post “The…
The infrastructure of my productivity is a set of tools that revolve around plain text files. Try as I might it doesn’t work any other way. I’ve tried tools with more “stuff” in them. Often when I try and import my modest1 set of files they grind to a halt. So, I go back to my tried and true tools. I’m thankful they exist and continue to work. It’s a patchwork…
I use Go off and on. I’ve recently had the opportunity to use it again. I feel comfortable now with a handful of languages including Go. More importantly I’ve fought fires in production, developed new services, and tried to refactor balls of mud in a handful of languages. Out of them all no language is more kind to it’s user then Go. That fact is on display in this talk Go at…
There is a book. Called “In The Beginning Was the Command Line” written by Neal Stephenson. 1 You might know him from such books as Snowcrash or Cryptonomicon, but he’s written some non-fiction as well. It’s hard to describe but it’s about the act of computing and the choices that surround folks who computed, especially in the late 90’s. It’s compelling…
I think about this sometimes. Like, people used to punch holes in cards to program. That’s insane to me, but I can only imagine what it will look like in the future. I think the biggest questions is like, will we even write code? Or, will we train, direct, or work with some … thing. Here’s an interesting post that talks about near to far future: “Programming: 50, 100 years…
I have worked on projects that missed the deadline by years. It’s soul-crushing. Whats worse is that it sounds like it’s endemic. Big projects are failing all over the place. Most IT experts agree that such failures occur far more often than they should. What’s more, the failures are universally unprejudiced: they happen in every country; to large companies and small; in commercial,…
Conventional Wisdom can be a bunch of BS. It can be a bludgeon to keep the troops in line. When it goes unexamined it can create group think that prevents healthy discourse.
I like most people am deathly afraid of crypto. There are just too many gotchas. Therefor I appreciate posts like these where smart folks break down the answers. We’re less interested in empowering developers and a lot more pessimistic about the prospects of getting this stuff right. https://latacora.singles/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html
It’s easy to see Kubernetes as “a way to run containerized workloads”. If you look at the comparisons that’s what they all do: ECS, Docker, and Mesos, etc. But, I don’t think that’s the vision for Kubernetes. Here are a few tweets from Kelsey Hightower: The future where Kubernetes clusters disappear and we just leverage Kubernetes style APIs to deploy workloads…
I’m torn between two axes. The first is being user-oriented. Thinking about the problems from their perspective and ensuring you are always working on something that improves value. The second is that good software is often fast software. While it’s hard to make a case that keeping a service at a p99 of 500ms will increase the value to your users, I’ve found that trying to make…
DevOps, at least as I understand it, is about delivering value. It sounds simple, but delivering that value happens via a pipeline. The stages of that pipeline often represent whole groupes of people. Ofthen those groups can have competing priorities. Thus increasing friction in the pipeline and slowing down the deliver of value. That’s where DevOps comes to the rescue. By working with…
The biggest irony in dev work is that we all want to build easy to use systems, but that’s hard to impossible to do. Easy is hard. Rich Hickey in his talk “Simple Made Easy” walks us through this irony and why its so important that we continue to try and build easy to use systems. 1 Here is a transcript of the talk as well. ↩︎
It’s not often that anyone can take up basic linux literacy and make it interesting, but Julia Evans1 does it with style. Here is her zine on pipes2: She doesn’t just illuminate linux, she will often bring that same clarity to more advanced topics such as service discovery. Here is a zine from a blog post 3 she wrote on Stripes engineering blog. So, checkout the zines, or one of her…
When I design a new service, I want it to be efficient. Mostly, for any humans involved, but also for the technical components. Why make two HTTP calls when you can make 1. When thinking about tradeoffs it can be helpful to consider how long common operations take. Not surprisingly, lists have been made of these common operations. As far as I can tell starting with Peter Norvig, and then…
Given I don’t know what I don’t know, but I want to find out. This taxonomy of ignorance and interesting thought experiment. The Five Orders of Ignorance 1 Lack of Ignorance. Lack of Knowledge. Lack of Awareness Lack of Process. Meta Ignorance http://losangeles.acm.org/Archives/laacm0512-Article%2002%20The%205%20Orders%20of%20Ignorance%20OCT%202000.pdf ↩︎
We don’t know what we don’t know. Clearly. But, sometimes the keys to a project exist in the unknown. Yet many of our project planning and execution tools don’t take this into account. If you just do the same thing over and over again, you will probably get better at performing that sequence, but you won’t learn anything new. That’s a quote from “Introducing…
There will be commit messages. Many. Of. Them. Your team will read them. Your boss will read them. Strangers will read them. You will read them. Future self is skeptical of present self. You owe it to everyone to try and write better commit messages. I’m not suggesting that I always do, it’s a lofty goal, but here is some help: Separate subject from body with a blank line Limit the…
I am a fan of tests, but my testing journey was long and fraught. One of the hardest ideas for me to understand was where do you draw the line. How much is enough? I tried many different ways to understand this, but it wasn’t until I read this quote from Kent Beck that a key idea crystalized. I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to…
During the course of my work I find my self rubberbanding between two extremes - universal truth and exacting, excruciating detail at a specific moment in time. Those many not seem like they are on the same continuum, but that’s where todays suggesting reading comes into play: The Three Ways by Gene Kim 1. I’m a sucker for bit of wisdom that is seemingly inscrutable, but reveals it…
But, how do they work? 1 Platforms are about leverage. When done well they increase value superlinear rate compared to the amount of resources available. They are also hard to define, hard to see, and hard to build. Today, I’ve got a one two punch. First an article from Frank Chimero, “Platforms as Tables, Tables as Platforms” 2. In it Chimero finds that Design and Jazz are both…
Whatever it is that you do, if you have wondered about increasing productivity, improving outcomes or creating more long lasting value, you owe it to your self to learn a little about the study of systems. Okay, starting with the most banal definition of a system: A system is a group of interacting or interrelated entities that form a unified whole.[1] A system is delineated by its spatial and…
There must be a large and storied body of literature when it comes to curation, but I am unfortunately not familiar. I might have a chance someday, but for now, what I do have is this article from Frank Chimero “Sorting A Mass” 1. Up till this point, I had bookmarked anything and everything that came close to piquing my interest. But after this article, I remember bringing more of a…
Being a child of the 80s I can recall a time before the internet permeated my entire reading experience. It was a happy accident for me and my career when I was able to access the internet on a daily bases. Before the internet, Wired came once a month. When I had enough money I’d buy 2600 (it’s hard to convince parents to subscribe to a “hackers” quarterly). Between…
Gonna start out the month with a fun and simple one. MP3 Blogs and wget by Jeffrey Veen. When I read this, I had a VPS, that I could barely keep running. I blindly ran the command in this post. The next morning I found that I had downloaded almost 30 gigabytes of MP3s. It forced me to learning about things about linux, and wget. This was important, because I got one of my first tech jobs because I…
500+ articles to read. That backlog took years to build. Years of, “Yea, I’ll totally read that”. Then not reading anything. While I was able to trash part of the backlog. (No, I don’t need to read “4 spaces are better then 2 when formatting code”). I still had a healthy backlog. To not keep anyone in suspense, I read it 1. Reading it reminded me of my favorite…
Well, around 3ish years ago I stared working for a company that sells software to libraries and I didn’t know a thing. I have learned a lot since then, but I am now embarking on a new journey and I would like to leave some advice to other software devs who might find themselves in similar situations. The best advice I can give is to find a community who can remind you of how important…
Managing IAM credentials is a burden. Besides juggling N separate credentials, I don’t want more secretes to manage. There must be a better way and I’m experimenting with some tools to find a better way.
After learning about JSON Feed I took some time to implment a template for Hugo. This relies upon version 0.20 of Hugo which has support for many alternative formats. You can see find this in the github repo for this site .
JSON Feed is a new format for syndication that was developed by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece . This is a great idea. Read the announcment .
I share Gabe Weatherheads sentiment about blogging. Is this it then? Is this the last gasp of independent blogging as everyone moves to micro transactions of half considered thoughts? Will Tweets eat Wordpress? It sure seems like the indie blogs are thinned down to a small collection of ideas and opinions. What I miss about blogging is the slow contemplation of a bloggers ideology. Indie bloggers…