Blogs / Personal blogs

Will Larson

lethain.com

Hey folks, I’m Will Larson! I wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive’s Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy. You might also be interested in my collection of popular blog posts over the years, or to read my writing as it’s published via my newsletter or my RSS feed.

Popular posts
25
Total points
4,823
HN comments
2,445
Rank
#234 personal

Visit lethain.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Apr 2009 – Nov 2025

Career & Management 22Tech Industry & Business 10Software Engineering 5Systems & Performance 3Web & Frontend 1Life, Learning & Writing 1

1

Founding Uber SRE

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do…

2

How to Safely Think in Systems

While there are a decent number of folks out there modeling systems, there’s a much larger group of folks who think of themselves as systems thinkers but utilize techniques like modeling rather casually (a polite way of saying that they don’t use them). Even with modeling tools available, I’ve often taken the shortcut…