blog
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Containers IRL

19 Sep 2023  ·  Docker confused me for a while. Containers are like VMs… but better, somehow? They’re “lightweight”, but I need to install some multi-gigabyte program and learn a special new file format in order to use them on my Mac? I’m developing…

Making Software With 4,999 Other People

27 Jul 2023  ·  Last month, I quit my job at Datadog after working there for a little over 3 years. I learned a lot while I was there – a lot of how you should do things, and of course a bit about…

Just Care Less

13 Jul 2023  ·  Disclaimer I actually wrote this post in the fall of 2022, but am only publishing it now, so – apologies for any eyebrow-raising uses of the word “recent”! Take a look at this recent Q&A post about burnout on Hacker…

Tools I Use For Work

10 Jul 2023  ·  Over the past couple of years, the way I use my computer to make software has more or less “solidified” – I have a small set of tools, and a method of using them together, which I can set up…

If It Isn't Love

15 Jan 2023  ·  What is the word I’m looking for? It isn’t “love”, even though that’s the first thing that comes to mind. It gets at the right idea, but it’s too broad, it means too many different things to different people. And…

How to Build Software like an SRE

13 Oct 2022  ·  I’ve been doing this “reliability” stuff for a little while now (~5 years), at companies ranging from about 20 developers to over 2,000. I’ve always cared primarily about the software elements I describe as living “outside” the application – like,…

A Slow Descent into Madness

06 Mar 2022  ·  To be clear, I’m really not into mechanical keyboards. Unlike most who end up with this kind of thing, I’m neither a hardware geek nor a fan of luxury stuff. I just wanted to learn how to touch type! This…

SRE Toolkit: Failure Domains

14 Oct 2021  ·  This post is first in a short series I’m calling the “SRE Toolkit”, each entry being a friendly introduction to one concept I’ve consistently found useful in my quest to make software sturdier. Up first – how to be good…

Outsourced

13 Mar 2021  ·  Do you ever wonder at the efficiency of a modern life? So many things that would take hours of effort in a previous life, like washing the laundry by hand, now take minutes of it instead. Entire classes of chores…

Measuring Developer Friction

31 Jan 2021  ·  I’m a monitoring nut. I’m a firm believer that you can’t improve what you’re not measuring, so it’s always fun for me to try to quantify everything at work that people care about – even the stuff that’s generally too…

Beauty in Limitation

08 Aug 2020  ·  I think everyone has a few “internet-only” hobbies. By this, I mean activities that they are interested in or like to read about, but don’t actively pursue in their daily lives. For me personally, one of these interests is people…

Intro to JAMstack (Jul 2020)

21 Jul 2020  ·  A small presentation given for students and alumni of the Flatiron School about the “JAMstack”, a newer approach to building modern web applications, and why it’s interesting to me (as a reliability engineer) in addition to web developers.

A Device for Creativity

29 Jun 2019  ·  As I’ve mentioned before, I like to think of programming as an art form. Just as the practice can be made up of CRUD web applications and incomprehensible legacy-code backends, it has another side, which is comprised of elegant designs,…

Exploiting Self-Improvement

15 May 2019  ·  I know that myself and the people I talk to aren’t a totally representative sample of 20-somethings in the 2010s, or even close, but at least in a certain kind of millenial (myself and some people I talk to included)…

An Infinite Fleet of Plumbers

07 Mar 2019  ·  Here at ActionIQ, we have to ingest a lot of data — thousands of terabytes, across dozens of data sources, for many clients, in several formats, multiple times per day. Dealing with enterprise-scale data processing could get overwhelming…

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