The Staff Engineer’s Path. This book discusses the “Staff+”engineering career paths, and gives concrete advice for folks in those roles. If you are established or new in a Staff+ role or struggling between choosing the Engineering/Management pendulum, this book is for you. What I liked: the entire book! Seriously. I enjoyed the Strategy/Vision section the most. The footnotes had great supplemental material. What I didn’t like: The concept of a drawing a map felt repetitive....

This post is about fixing a nagging issue with audio on a Vizio sound bar. The problem: during periods of silence in videos, the audio would cut out compeltely and turn back on with a significant delay. To illustrate: &feature=share This YouTube video has you guess the Disney theme. The theme you guess starts playing when a 15 second timer counts down. There’s a brief silence pause after each entry....

API by Design. This book is focused on REST APIs and introduces ways to measure complexity and some techniques to tame complexity. If you’ve ever worked on a REST API adversely impacted your WTFs/minute, this is a good book to consider. What I liked: introducing new ways to communicate complexity, like Reference Entanglement (APIs with excessive references or arbitrary counts of nested resources). I also liked the section that quantified complexity based on optional parameters....

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. I feel like Accelerate was an OK book. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended from Charity’s blog. I was hopeful for some mind blowing content, but it mostly provided confirmation of some truths I’ve encountered in industry a decade ago. What I liked: Research-backed conclusions about engineering methodologies. The book provides a reader some vocabulary, techniques, research, and links to business outcomes....

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time. I feel like this book gets less fanfare than the Google SRE books but it’s just as valuable. Like Google’s SRE books, this book has a mixture of useful information, wonderful explanations, and Google-flavored navel gazing. What I liked: the first 16 chapters or so had me really engaged. I especially enjoyed the author’s clear definition of software engineering vs....

On call runbooks are a subset of a team’s runbooks used to assist on call responders. I’ve recently had conversations with a few folks about on call runbooks and I thought my view warranted a blog post. In this post, I’ll describe on call runbooks, their pros and cons, and better places to invest developer time. My views in this post assume two-pizza software engineering teams that are on call for own code....

Content disappears from time to time on the web. This post is my own mirror of John Rauser’s Twitter thread that I frequently reference. Inspired by this HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554288, I offer a story about software rewrites and Bezos as a technical leader. I was once in an annual planning meeting at Amazon. In attendance was Jeff, every SVP at amazon, my VP and all the directors in my org....

I’ve been using Zoom on a daily basis for a while now. If you’re already a seasoned video conference user, these may help! These pro tips are focused on Mac OS use of Zoom, other platforms have similar functionality. Gallery View The default view in Zoom is called “Speaker View”. This keeps your view focused on whoever is speaking. Gallery View shows all participants at once. I prefer Gallery View for brief, informal team meetings....

A common technique to help TLS migrations is providing a redirect. For example, this blog, hosted on Wordpress.com, redirects all HTTP requests on port 80 to one using TLS on port 443. $ curl -v http://virtualandy.wordpress.com * Rebuilt URL to: / * Trying 192.0.78.13... * TCP_NODELAY set * Connected to virtualandy.wordpress.com (192.0.78.13) port 80 (#0) > GET / HTTP/1.1 > Host: virtualandy.wordpress.com > User-Agent: curl/7.54.0 > Accept: */* > Referer: > < HTTP/1....

I spent the majority of the 2010s working from a home office. Sometimes folks ask about my setup, so I thought it was time to show it all in a post. This post does not contain any affiliate links. Desk in standing position Tech Video Conferencing Microphone: Samson Meteor (2014) Camera: Logitech HD Portable 1080p Webcam C615 with Autofocus (2014) Light: Ring Light Webcam Mount (2019). I added a light after changing to a lower light room and reading Scott Hanselman’s Good, Better, Best post....