I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, and particularly enjoyed this quote from a memo discussed in the Zero Defects chapter: You can improve the quality of your code, and if you do, the rewards for yourself and for Microsoft will be immense. The hardest part is to decide that you want to write perfect code. If I wrote that in an internal memo, I imagine the engineering team would mutiny, but software quality is certainly an interesting topic where I continue to refine my ...| lethain.com
We have developed a critical philosophy behind how we build software, and the tech stack we rely on. We call it Run Less Software.| The Intercom Blog
In early 2014, I joined as an engineering manager for Uber’s Infrastructure team. We were responsible for a wide number of things, including provisioning new services. While the overall team I led grew significantly over time, the subset working on service provisioning never grew beyond four engineers. Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform. More importantly, they did it while absorbing the majority, although certainly not the ...| lethain.com
From their first introduction in 2005, the debate between adopting a microservices architecture, a monolithic service architecture, or a hybrid between the two, has become one of the least-reversible decisions that most engineering organizations make. Even migrating to a different database technology is generally a less expensive change than moving from monolith to microservices or from microservices to monolith. The industry has in many ways gone full circle on that debate, from most hypersc...| lethain.com
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data Driven Products Now! if Kellan had not been there to so thoroughly stick the landing on technology choices.| Dan McKinley :: Math, Programming, and Minority Reports