Posts

This site’s been running for 15 years. During that time, I’ve heard from work colleagues and internet strangers about how the site’s helped them solve specific problems and shown them how to learn new technologies. The majority of the site’s content covers virtualization, systems administration, and infrastructure. Nowadays, I’m spending less time in these areas. Virtualization and infrastructure are still incredibly interesting and definitely not solved problems, they’re just not where I’m hanging my hat these days....

Tidy First?. This book discusses a series of practices that improve codebases. If you have a codebase that is resistant to change, this book provides several specific techniques to improve the codebase. This is the first book in an upcoming series from Beck. What I liked: Several of the individual “tidying” techniques were ones I’ve used but now I have a better way to communicate them, and the value of tidying to others....

A Case Study in Community-Driven Software Adoption I came across this 2019 report while browsing Google’s SRE Podcast called Prodcast (that’s a fun name!). I still can’t force myself to listen to podcasts. The report is a solid read. I enjoyed the discussion of social differences between traditional product engineering teams (referred to as DEV for some reason) infrastructure/SRE teams. It quotes a specific DEV/SRE postmortem: There is very little notion, in this SRE team especially, of an IC [Individual Contributor] being given a task without also being given the decision making for that task....

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....