Deliberate side-products
Why overcomplicated software products start defeating their own purpose, and how to prevent that| Gojko's blog
'AI-Friendly' is the New 'Boring'| kyle.cascade.family
Why overcomplicated software products start defeating their own purpose, and how to prevent that| Gojko's blog
There is no “AWS for shadow charities”, so how do we run Anna’s Archive?| annas-archive.org
Clever code is a bad idea 95% of the time, this is the other 5%| buttondown.com
Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them...| lethain.com
The annual retrospective post that started in 2020 lives on for another year.| falkus.co
Building a lightweight Go app on the Jetstream| ★❤✰ Vicki Boykis ★❤✰
In my career, the majority of the strategy work I’ve done has been in non-executive roles, things like Uber’s service migration. Joining Calm was my first executive role, where I was able to not only propose but also mandate strategy. Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined. Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure? Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages? How did we rescue the stuck service decom...| lethain.com
Whether you’re managing a group or facing challenges solo, these aphorisms offer a way to streamline your thinking and create a culture that thrives on problem-solving.| CodeKraft
Jonathan E. Magen's website!| yonkeltron.com
Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful, it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy. When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy that your organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather than investing time into understanding it. Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful of useful mental models to avoid both extremes. This chapter covers:| lethain.com
If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about... give them something to link to! …| simonwillison.net
This post delves into crucial challenges at each product maturity phase. Senior engineering managers and high-level executives will benefit significantly from examining their portfolios and applyin…| CodeKraft
Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.| blog.glyph.im
jorge started as a Go learning project, so writing down my thoughts on the language seemed like a good way to wrap up this devlog.| jorge
As engineering leaders contemplate internal developer platforms (IDPs), many are unaware of the organizational and cultural "fine print" that comes with them.| Klotho
From JSON Files to etcd: A Tailscale Database Migration Story| tailscale.com
I recently joined a startup to run an engineering org of about 40 engineers. My title is VP Engineering. However, I have been having lots of ongoing conflict with the CEO (a former engineer) around…| charity.wtf
Cold-blooded software| dubroy.com
There are a few tendencies among programmers that involve the totem of “simplicity.” There’s the ancient concept of KISS, of course, but there’s also the much-abused YAGNI, the insistence that we “Choose Boring Technology,” entire languages that base their elevator pitch around the idea that they’re “simple,” and the concept in object-oriented design that “every class should have a single responsibility.” The problem with these approaches is that “simplicity” never g...| asthasr.github.io
All carts, no horses.| federal-field-notes.ca
Honeycomb recently announced our $50M Series D funding round. We aren’t the type to hype this a lot; Emily summed it up crisply as, “Living another day on someone else’s money isn’t bus…| charity.wtf
Throughout my career, I’ve developed some opinions. Some have worn particularly deep ruts,| paulosman.me
The critical resource is not *developer time*, it's *developer energy*| twitchard.github.io
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This company/team/self framework proved itself a helpful decision-making tool, and almost always led to the “correct” outcome. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferences over ...| lethain.com
When it comes to implementing a new feature in an application’s ecosystem, I don’t like spending my innovation tokens unless I have to, so I try not to add new tools to my infrastructure unless I really need them. This same approach comes when I either want, need, or have been told, to implement a Service Mesh. This means I don’t instantly setup Istio. Not because it’s bad - far from it - but because it’s extra complexity I would rather avoid, unless I need it.| andydote.co.uk
Welcome to open source vxlabs software development handbook. It contains a number of best practices for building software, generally web-based, using Python on the backend and TypeScript for the frontend. However, most of the guidelines are more broadly applicable. Important note: These are only guidelines. They were never meant to be applied dogmatically. They are great when you are starting fresh, and their intentions are good, but please do understand and adapt to your situation.| vxlabs
