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
Most engineering organizations separate engineering and product leadership into distinct roles. This is usually ideal, not only because these roles benefit on distinct skills, but also because they thrive from different perspectives and priorities. It’s quite hard to do both well at the same time. This post takes a look at my high-level approach to product management for when you do happen to find yourself wearing both hats.| lethain.com
Another year, another ShipItCon! I’ve talked already on the previous instances of the conference. To keep things short, it’s an annual conference based in Dublin that works around the i…| Wrong Side of Memphis
Technical infrastructure is never complete. System processes can always run with less overhead or be bin-packed onto fewer machines. Data can be retrieved more quickly and stored at a cheaper cost per terabyte. System design can broaden the gap between failure and user impact. Transport layers can be more secure.| lethain.com
I’m speaking at Velocity on June 12th on ‘How Stripe invests in technical infrastructure’, and this is the rough outline of the content the talk will cover. I hope to see y’all there.| lethain.com
Big Ball of Mud was published twenty years ago, and rings just as true today: the most prominent architecture in successful, growth-stage companies is non-architecture. Crisp patterns are slowly overgrown by the chaotic tendrils of quick fixes, and productivity creeps towards zero.| lethain.com
Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which things are fads, so for uncontroversial…| Engineering at Slack
Most months I get at least one email from an engineering leader who believes they’d be a candidate for significantly more desirable roles if their personal brand were just better known. Similarly, when funding is readily available during periods of tech industry expansion, many companies believe they are principally constrained by their hiring velocity–if their engineering organization’s brand was just a bit better, they believe they’d be hiring much faster.| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
Several years ago, my friend Bobby showed me an article about a CEO who used systems thinking to understand their company’s bottlenecks, which eventually lead to him buying out his cofounder, who had been leading their sales team. As is the case for most stories about ourselves that we decide to publish widely, this decision turned out to be the right one, and their business flourished.| lethain.com
Interview occurred in February, 2022. Read more from Shawn on his blog, twitter, and his book, The Coding Career Handbook. Tell us a little about your current role: where do you work, your title and generally the sort of work you and your team do. I’m currently Head of Developer Experience at Temporal.io, an open source workflow engine for long running, durable processes powering companies as small as 2-person YCombinator startups, to enterprises as large as Stripe, Snap, Datadog, Netflix, ...| infraeng.dev
By far the biggest code improvement we made to Wave was to split our codebase in half. Our first product was building faster and cheaper money transfer to Africa, by delivering funds directly to M-Pesa and similar systems. That business grew incredibly quickly, but eventually hit a wall: most countries in Africa didn’t have a system like M-Pesa. We realized that this roadblock was actually an opportunity. Instead of just international money transfer, why not build our own mobile money syste...| www.wave.com