Job titles aren’t what they once were. Of course, they’ve never been what they once were, either. We like to put order to the chaos, imagining some consistent through line in tech, but I’ve seen few companies maintain their engineering ladder, at least for ICs, for any extended period of time. They tend to be somewhat volatile over the lifetime… Read more →
I wasn’t originally planning on a write up of SREcon24 Americas, but some ideas bubbled in my head, along with some themes, and there were a ton of solid talks (the speaker line up was wall-to-wall heavy hitters). I’m also curious how I’ll feel about my talk in the future and wanted to capture that to look back on. And… Read more →
How do we justify the need to make our organizations more resilient? Quick Primer: in this context, a shorthand for resilience is adapting to unexpected changes in an environment in an attempt to return to stability. It’s not robustness, like an automatic fail-over of a system without human intervention (removing a server from a pool behind a load balancer for… Read more →
We often talk about blame aware culture. Your teams are continuously working towards building a system where, among many goals, a safe and reliable system is available. When we’re surprised, incidents happen. As we’re working towards safety, and by definition these incidents are surprises, shaming folks for failure is counterproductive and instead we should celebrate the opportunity to learn more.… Read more →
Company culture can’t be understated. A big portion of what we do revolves around building exciting projects, tackling hard problems, and working with talented folks in our industry. These often constitute high pressure situations that necessitate fostering bonds between coworkers. Some folks want to clock in, sit down and work for eight hours, and then clock out without having interacted… Read more →
Imagine you’re heading down a road – biking, driving in your car, taking a walk – and you notice a trash can roll into the street. You quickly realize that any large obstruction rolling around is a potential hazard, for you and others. It’s not your trash can. It’s not your street. In fact, it’s likely that you can safely… Read more →
Note: This post is cross posted on Jeli’s blog When we think of the bands of communication that help facilitate our incidents (text chat, phone bridges, video calls), we tend to discount smaller cues, the inbetween that colors and adds depth. It may be on those video calls the notable pause when considering a problem, the tone of voice that… Read more →
I’m putting together a series on common questions candidates face in technical screens. My hope is to give folks a leg up on how they can prepare, and secondarily any screeners better understand what they’re asking and how to improve for a better signal.No question (or answer) is perfect, but that shouldn’t stop us from exploring them. Feedback and constructive… Read more →
Best practices aren’t universal and the use of the term without deeper consideration can be problematic. They’re straightforward, simplistic answers to difficult questions. Quick answers can at times work in our favor, a way to avoid cognitive overhead and set a clear path to a solution. In fact, we regularly need shortcuts in our day to day work to be… Read more →