Uber’s best known corporate value is probably Super Pumped, which, in addition to being a one-time company value, is also the title of Mike Isaac’s account of Uber and the subsequent television show. However, for me personally, the value I remember most is Let Builders Build. Working in Uber’s infrastructure engineering organization, I once chatted with a product engineering manager who wanted to continue rolling out a new feature that was hammering the production database. I was concer...| lethain.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
Shortly after a senior leader joins a new company, sometimes you’ll notice them quickly steer the organization towards a total architectural rewrite. Perhaps this is a switch from batch to streaming computation, perhaps a switch from a monolith to a services architecture, perhaps it’s a rewrite into a new programming language. If you take a few minutes to reflect, I bet you can identify several times where you’ve had this experience. Regardless of the proposed technical change, it’s a...| lethain.com
Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to “start well.” How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” immediately with making the right decisions?| 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
In Staff Engineer’s chapter on Managing Technical Quality, one of the very last suggestions is creating a centralized process to curate technical changes: Curate technology change using architecture reviews, investment strategies, and a structured process for adopting new tools. Most misalignment comes from missing context, and these are the organizational leverage points to inject context into decision-making. Many organizations start here, but it’s the last box of tools that I recommend...| lethain.com
Hello, and welcome to a new edition of Links lists! A few longer but interesting articles this week, and a couple of short ones. I hope you enjoy them! Tech article Swapping memory at Meta Swapping unused memory to the disk, to fit more applications in RAM, is a simple concept that all developers (I hope!) are familiar with. This article from FacebookMeta explains how they have built an infrastructure, composed of a kernel module and a userspace agent, to more aggressively implement swapping ...| andreabergia.com
