December 2023 – charity.wtf
1 post published by mipsytipsy during December 2023| charity.wtf
Last week Facebook announced that they will be shutting down Parse. I have so, so many feelings. But this isn’t about my feelings now. This is about what I wish I had known when we g…| charity.wtf
I wrote a lot of blog posts over my time at Parse, but they all evaporated after Facebook killed the product. Most of them I didn’t care about (there were, ahem, a lot of “service relia…| charity.wtf
I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…| charity.wtf
This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engi…| charity.wtf
A few eagle-eyed readers have noticed that it’s been 4 weeks since my last entry in what I have been thinking of as my “niblet series” — one small piece per week, 1000 words or less, for the next t…| charity.wtf
Hi friends! We’re on week three of my 12-week practice in writing one bite-sized topic per week — scoping it down, writing straight through, trying real hard to avoid over-writing or editing down to a pulp. Week 1 — “On Writing, Social Media, and Finding the Line of Embarrassment” Week 2 — “On Dropouts and […]| charity.wtf
In my early twenties I had a cohort of friends and coworkers, all Silicon Valley engineers, all quite good at their jobs, all college dropouts. We developed a shared conviction that only losers got…| charity.wtf
Brace yourself, because I’m about to utter a sequence of words I never thought I would hear myself say: I really miss posting on Twitter. I really, really miss it. It’s funny, because Twitter was n…| charity.wtf
Groan. Well, it’s not like I wasn’t warned. When I first started teasing out the differences between the pillars model and the single unified storage model and applying “2.0” to the latter, Christi…| charity.wtf
I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate…| charity.wtf
Hazel Weakly, you little troublemaker. As I whined to Hazel over text, after she sweetly sent me a preview draft of her post: “PLEASE don’t post this! I feel like I spend all my time trying to help bring clarity and context to what’s happening in the market, and this is NOT HELPING. Do you […]| charity.wtf
Originally posted on the Honeycomb blog on November 19th, 2024 We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechn…| charity.wtf
Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read,…| charity.wtf
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The company is growing like crazy, your engineering team keeps rising to the challenge, and you are ferociously proud of them. But some cracks are be…| charity.wtf
My friend Molly has had an impressive career. She got a job as a software engineer after graduating from college, and after kicking ass for a year or so she was offered a promotion to management, w…| charity.wtf
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets: (I originally titled this arti…| charity.wtf
Augh! I am so behind on so much writing, I’m even behind on writing shit that I need to reference in order to write other pieces of writing. Like this one. So we’re just gonna do this quick and dir…| charity.wtf
Every year or so, some tech CEO does something massively stupid, like declaring “No politics at work!”, or “Trump voters are oppressed and live in fear!”, and we all get a good pained laugh over ho…| charity.wtf
I got an interesting tweet the other day from @evntdrvn in response to this thread of mine. Paraphrasing, “So I’ve almost got our group at work up to Step 1 in your observability maturi…| charity.wtf
Last weekend, @swyx posted a great little primer to instrumentation titled “Observability Tools in JavaScript”. A friend sent me the link and suggested that I might want to respond and…| charity.wtf
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
Original title: “Why Should You (Or Anyone) Become An Engineering Manager?” The first piece I ever wrote about engineering management, The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, was written as a lo…| charity.wtf
This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust. I got a couple requests to turn it into a blog post for sharing purposes; here you g…| charity.wtf
Last week was the West Coast Velocity conference. I had a terrific time — I think it’s the best Velocity I’ve been to yet. I also slipped in quite late, the evening before last,…| charity.wtf
Last month I got to attend GOTO Chicago and give a talk about continuous deployment and high-performing teams. Honestly I did a terrible job, and I’m not being modest. I had just rolled off a…| charity.wtf
Story time. Susan was hired as a database engineer. Her primary projects, which are supposed to be upgrading/rolling out a major point release and running load tests against various config options …| charity.wtf
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
I have begun to notice a common blind spot among engineers who are frustrated about leveling up, which is: not every opportunity exists at every company at every time| charity.wtf
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story). The central drama for many people goes something like this: “I’m a senior engineer, but I’m thin…| charity.wtf
One of the classic failure modes of management is the empire-builder — the managers who measure their own status, rank or value by the number of teams and people “under” them. Eve…| charity.wtf
