I recently had a chance to review Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, which takes a critical look at several examples of catastrophic failure in many differing areas and applies Perrow’s theories of Normal Accidents in order to address these systemic problems we face regularly. A lot of the background in human factors I’m… Read more →
How do engineers look at resumes?
Resumes offer a view into an engineer’s professional and educational life, but can only skim the surface. Condensing all of your hard work into a page or two can’t explain everything. How will you handle a roadmap that suddenly upends half way through the quarter? Can you be a valuable asset in a crisis to help mitigate an ongoing outage?… Read more →
A 101 on debugging php internals with gdb
Every now and then I dig into PHP internals with gdb, typically to debug issues with the Gearman Pecl extension as I’m currently primary maintainer for the project. It’s a fairly low time demand, despite the handful of issues lingering at the moment, so I’ll poke at it maybe 3 or 4 times a year since completing the migration to… Read more →
No, seriously. Root Cause is a Fallacy.
I’m just back from attending SREcon ’18 Americas in Santa Clara last week, an incredible conference I’ve spoken at before in Dublin in 2016 as a tutorial, but never in the U.S. You can find some blog posts written about specifics (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3), but I wouldn’t be able to do it justice myself, so read those!… Read more →
Thoughts on the role of Incident Commander
As with most of my blog posts, this should be considered a living document, the ideas offered here being malleable, as I would hope the document that it references be flexible to new ideas. Conversations surrounding this welcomed and encouraged as we all continue to learn. I recently came across Pagerduty’s documentation surrounding their philosophy on the Incident Commander (here… Read more →
Arrive with Questions for an Interview
Interviews are not one sided. It often seems that way since the power dynamics typically skew towards the interviewers over the interviewee. They have the final say and you’re trying to impress them, right? Well, not entirely. Companies of course can’t force you to join. In fact, there’s a lot that needs to be agreed upon by both parties before… Read more →
Recognizing adaptability in learning
The following is the current version of a section in my book on interviewing for technical roles. I’m trying to help out with any advice I can while I’m putting all of this together. As part of that, I’m looking for constructive criticism and feedback alongside it. My experiences as an engineer are also not universal and so my own biases… Read more →
Why I’m writing about Interviewing for Technical Roles
The following is the current version of the preface to my book on interviewing for technical roles. As mentioned below, it was one of the first things I wrote. I’ve reworked it many times for just 2+ pages of writing, but it is almost certainly not “finished” yet. I’m planning on including bits and pieces of the book I’m writing… Read more →
While on sabbatical…
I’m incredibly fortunate to have had several weeks of paid leave at my job. It’s a perk of working at Etsy after 5 years, though I took it after 6 because it lined up better with plans to buy a house and coordinate with my wife’s summer breaks. I haven’t had more than 2 weeks away from work since 2004… Read more →
On becoming an author
So it’s 2017 and I’m creating a blog. I’ve written personal blog posts before, but they weren’t technical in nature (and were a very rough attempt at comedy, to be honest). They were also great learning experiences. To steal one of my favorite John Allspaw quips, “Comedy is about taking risks”. Taking risks is a good way of intro-ing this… Read more →