I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
I joined GitLab in October 2015, and left in December 2021 after working there for a little more than six years.
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…
Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…
Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended
Just after midnight Eastern Time on July 19, 2024, the enterprise cybersecurity company CrowdStrike YOLOed a software update to millions of Windows machines. Or as they put it:
My takeaways from selling TinyPilot
There’s a right and wrong way to proceed. Here’s how to increase the chances your leader listens and takes action--while reducing the chance they feel threatened.
Finding diamonds in the rough
Best practices and principles to create accurate and reliable software based financial systems.
The market needs to be irrational for you to stay solvent.
The costs of some parts of solar farms will drop to near zero. But some obstacles remain to make this energy cheaply available everywhere. As a result, the entire energy industry will change. What are those obstacles? How will the industry change?
Wartime can be extremely demanding for Engineering Managers. But by ruthlessly focusing on delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining their own strength, an EM can lead their people to not just survive but thrive under pressure.
Jon's personal site.
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
Last week, I received the following invitation to a compulsory on-site meeting, following management's repeated engagements with some sort of Agile shaman.
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
The best way to both save Intel and have leading edge manufacturing in the U.S. is to split the company, and for the U.S. government to pick up the bill via purchase guarantees.
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
i talk about how the idea of a humanity-saving tech revolution from the usual tech suspects is dead (for me).
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
Lessons learned from a year of startup life.
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
Notable case of algorithmic approach to open source and non-profit giving
i vent about return to office bullshittery.
Bringing the great successes of financial engineering to Rust.
