In the 1990’s, I had access to the early internet (before the web) and made use of a public forum ( Usenet ) where I could ask and respond to questions about programming the Macintosh computer. I’ve mentioned before how this caught the attention of engineering at Apple ( Tom Dowdy , in any event). Perhaps too, the…
The ideas behind the DevOps movements undeniably changed the software development world for the better - but by now, the term “DevOps” has lost all meaning. Sometimes an idea is so good, that you can’t argue with it. I’m not saying that the original idea behind “DevOps” was perfect - I’ve written about some of the…
Friction Between Product and Engineering; Lack of trust and collaboration slowing down product growth
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…
Manu Cornet's personal website.
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…
Disclaimer: I know not all jobs can be done from home. This article is aimed at the ones that can be done remotely yet have ‘management…
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective. Most graduate…
From the depths of the IT world, there are things that you only learn through experience.
Managing sets of small, dependent PRs enables faster review and increased developer velocity
I spent 20 years slaving away at companies doing development, maintenance, troubleshooting, architecture, management, and whatever else needed doing. For all those years I was a permanent hire, working on technology from within.
Working in Cloud Native consulting , I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work ‘.
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.
No advice is good for everyone, but these are at least worth considering
In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired.
The email landed in my inbox around 10:05/am, alerting us of an all-hands meeting in 15 minutes. “Guess we got acquired”, we all thought. 16 minutes later, we were all laid off. This was February of 2001. I was first alerted of my uselessness in 1995, when ~ fresh out of college ~ I worked ... Read more
Learn how to onboard engineers with an empathetic and structured approach. Includes a 30-60-90-day check-in template.
Wesley Faulkner’s story
Building software looks a lot like building a house, but selling the two couldn't be more different.
Because your lifeblood, Revenue and Funding, are drying up
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
How distraction became our default way of working and what you can do to reclaim your focus
Code reviews are one of the most important parts of the software development process At Meta we’ve recognized the need to make code reviews as fast as possible without sacrificing quality We’re sha…
