Software and Ego
12 Sep 2024 · I’ve had the good fortune to work with some really incredible engineers in my career. I mean the sort of people who spawned the “10x developer” myth – the ones who can write entire low-level databases from scratch which outperform…
Honda HR-V Measurements
07 Aug 2024 · My wife Hannah and I got a car a few months ago! Specifically, it is a used 2021 Honda HR-V, which (for us) strikes a great balance of being small on the outside and big on the inside. Most importantly,…
What's In A Watt
06 May 2024 · About two years ago, Valve debuted the “Steam Deck”, a handheld computer that looked like a Nintendo Switch but was capable of running PC games. Then, 6 months ago, the company followed this up with an updated model called the…
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…