Over the winter break I read Working Backwards, written by a couple of Amazon OGs. I thought it was quite good – definitely worth the read. I had two big take-aways from the book that are very relative to startup/scale-up life. Being metrics driven Not surprisingly, Amazon is a very data-driven company. The authors place […]| scott persinger
(Editor’s note: this post was written by human hands. No AIs were harmed or employed in writing these words.) I can’t say at the moment that I have any great revelation to add to the AI discussion. I am as impressed, excited, and scared as anyone. Some of the best things I’ve read so far […]| scott persinger
Right around quarterly planning time, I wrote a little bit about the lies we tell ourselves in engineering, especially around planning time.| scott persinger
I really enjoyed Will Larson’s recent post on measuring engineering. Excellently written as always, and Will provides a great framework for thinking about measurement for different audiences. He provides a taxonomy for thinking about measuring for different stakeholders. This is a recent shift that we have made at Tatari, from measuring for ourselves to doing […]| scott persinger
As we roll into 2023, the headwinds in tech continue. Most of the big guys have done a round of layoffs now, with the notable exception of Google. But there is incessant chatter that Google will find some way to reduce headcount cost. Smart engineering leaders have already pivoted from “boom cycle” concerns around hiring […]| scott persinger
Ok, the last time I updated my blog I went full geek with the static site generator pages hosted on Github pages. This is a great approach for a blog that you never update! But I tired of the friction of having to remember exactly how to create new posts, and wondering if the publishing […]| scott persinger
I have had the great fortune of starting a few companies and products from scratch. These were true mythic green field opportunities – not a line of code existed when we started. For most companies, however, and most developers, there is some legacy of code written some time in the past. And some of this code may […]| scott persinger
Over the years I have come to appreciate how trust is the key ingredient to any effective engineering organization. The presence of trust enables all sort of things to magically happen, while its absence can torpedo almost any effort. Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage places trust as the base principle amongst five that he identifies as the […]| scott persinger
I’ve been spending time lately trying to get a deeper understanding of the current world of AWS. That platform grows and changes so quickly that it takes real effort just to keep up! The brea…| scott persinger
Recently I wanted to get my hands dirty using some of the new dev tools from OpenAI. I really wanted to try using their LLM “with my own data”. The typical approach for this is using RAG – Retrieva…| scott persinger