Amazon, AWS, Twitch.tv, Whole Foods, Woot, and Audible are among the companies that use document driven meetings to plan new products, features, and processes.
This is an example PR/FAQ to help you understand the document format.
The format is not as...
I'm happy with how this video turned out. Click the image to watch the full 1 minute. Does this count as a gif or a link? I'm going to say yes, but I'll still include 3 links.
Sharpening your ax, or sandpaperThis gif doesn't do the billboard justice. Make you you click on the image to see the video without being sped up to fit in email.
The smallest mistake can bring the whole thing down. A quick reminder that these gifs are often smaller, compressed, and sometimes shorter than the originals to fit inside email. Each gif is linked to the original place where I found it and I...
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Problems
Isn’t it great when a problem fixes itself? I’ve seen this happen more often with people systems than with technology. Ignore that email a couple of days and it’s likely not to be a problem anymore.
With technology we usually have to...
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Logic
How people think has been on the mind of philosophers for ages. Aristotle had the most famous works on logic for around 2000 years. In the 1600’s Gottfried Leibniz attempted to improve on Aristotle’s logic by simplifying it and...
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Moment of impact
If you watch the gif again look at the moment the ball hits the glass. The glass appears to shatter before the ball makes contact. How is that possible?
It turns out glass often breaks from tension rather than compression....
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Skill
Some developers are very skilled. They can do things seemingly impossible for others. It might be developing a feature faster than others, debugging a hard problem, or reaching new scale with systems.
Many times those skills are...
Some weeks I love the structure of this newsletter. It helps me not dump a ton of information but focus on just a few things each week. Other weeks—like this week—I have a ton of cool tools and articles to share but can't if I want to follow my own rules.
The newsletter passed 250 subscribers and 200 Twitter followers this week and I appreciate you all. ❤️ I love reading your replies and seeing you all share issues too. If you have suggestions for future topics feel free to hit reply and send them my way.
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Continuous frustration
Continuous integration and deployment systems have gone through a lot of changes. What started as shared bash scripts and Makefiles changed into central systems that could be shared by multiple developers and teams....
Welcome to 123dev from Revue. This is the first issue I migrated from Buttondown. You may need to adjust your mail filters because the sending address has changed.
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BGP
I heard the GIF came from what happened when Facebook ran the following command.
ip link set fb0 down
Thankfully they were able to fix it with
sudo reboot
Thinking
If you’re overthinking you should write. If you’re underthinking you...
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Laying a trap for yourself
I have lost track of how many times I’ve patched a bug only to have it come back and hit me in the head. Sometimes tests will help you avoid a self-made trap, but more often then not I’ll just push harder until it breaks.
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I twice had lunch with Ed Catmull at Disney and I asked him if there was anything that surprised him about managing people. He said he was surprised how well people can game rules and metrics for their own benefit.
The above gif may or may...
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Edutainment
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.
Walt Disney
What’s next?
I had a lightning talk for Devops Days Portland called “TikTalk” about innovation....
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Shipping products
This past week I was part of the team that launched EKS Anywhere. Launching an open source project was something I really wanted to do to see how it was different from products and services I’ve helped launch in the...
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Tools you’re familiar with
The right tool for the job isn’t always the best tool. Some tools are made for a specific reason, but there is a learning curve and cognitive tax to know how to use new tools. Sometimes the right tool is the one...
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Stress
As a junior developer you get assigned work and have to implement it and solve problems within a certain scope. As you get more senior you have more responsibility which often comes with more visibility and more pressure. Sometimes...
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Puzzling
Growing up my dad loved puzzles. He had the weirdest rule that I never understood.
No matter how many pieces the puzzle had, he would look at the picture once when he opened it and never looked at it again. Thankfully, he never...
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Stealing The Corner Office
I listened to this book and here are the action items to help you climb the career ladder into senior leadership if that’s what you want. It’s not the best strategies for a dev/IC, but some of the tips are still...
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Your build tools are great, but no one wants to learn them
I’ve never worked somewhere that had a completely off-the-shelf CI/CD system. In some cases the systems are just minor tweaks or wrapper scripts over common tools (usually Jenkins)....
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Cher Ami
Cher Ami was a messenger pigeon used by the American army in France during WWI. A battalion of 550 troops was surrounded by the German army and the allies thought they were in a different location. The Major was trying to send out...
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Resiliency
Code and systems break all the time. At a certain scale it’s important that your start building software that can heal itself. It’s sometimes confusing what that means because what state should the software return to?
While it was...
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An industry secret
For all the automation the technology industry prides itself in there’s still a lot of it that’s manual. Some companies get up on stage and talk about how great their automatic canary deployments are, how they use feature...
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Code generators
Lots of people recommend learning to program by starting with fundamentals. Learn the basic language patterns and elements and work your way up to frameworks. You’ll have a stronger understanding of how things work.
I don’t...
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Silent stories
The ability to educate with stories is something humans are very good at. Videos are just a new(ish) medium for telling stories. One of the reasons I love gifs is they’re videos with restrictions. The restrictions limit the...
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Simplicity vs User Experience
Why do fans have that weird nob to turn on oscillation but they have buttons for speed control? Why not put an oscillation button on the front? The nob is hard to reach and especially difficult while the fan is...
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Who’s to blame?
Many of us probably heard about the HBOMax email that was sent out by mistake last week. It wasn’t a major outage, but a lot of people were talking about it. I especially loved the outpouring of support I saw online for...
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Declarative and imperative
Oftentimes in technology we say declarative things are better than imperative. Why write a script when you can create an abstraction? In reality there’s no such thing as something being completely declarative...
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Nostalgia technology
Looking back at old technology products most of the time I think how bad they were. Occasionally, I remember something I really liked and I wish I could have it again. But then I realize the products were good at the time...
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Curiosity
Sometimes our curiosity gets the best of us. I cannot count how many times I’ve run a command, changed a config, or pushed a button that burned me. Usually, I learn my lesson. Many times I’ve put up guardrails or warnings so other...
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End results
When I think about how I create software it feels very haphazard. Some days are better than others but I rarely make the progress I want. By the time I’m ready to share with someone I realize how much a week or a month of steady...
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Self made complexity
Everyone is familiar with their own complexity. I’m sure this clock makes sense to the person who built it. When you’re the one who creates it it doesn’t seem complex but perfectly logical.
Complexity shows up in our...
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Wings (1927)
The gif is from a silent film I’ve never seen but it won the first ever Academy Award (1930). Ninety years later I would have a hard time reproducing that shot, and I love the vision someone had to make it happen. It reminded me...
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When code works
Sometimes I’m equally surprised as this baby when my code works. Especially when I either do it on the first try or I fight with it for days and finally figure it out. It’s exciting and then I try to figure out why it...
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I still don’t know how this works
I was at Disney Animation when they first showed us the animatronics for the new Beauty and the Beast ride for Tokyo Disneyland. I never saw this transformation and still don’t understand how it...
Click the image for the full length video. It’s worth it.
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Survival
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
You may think that...
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Planning work
I’m sure many of you saw this gif in various places recently. There’s lots of similarities that are obvious from a software engineering perspective. To me it shows how difficult a re-write really is.
Estimating
“Most people...
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Rolling upgrades
The gif this week is the first of many I’ve made with a focus on teaching engineering concepts. It is part of an article I wrote for The New Stack explaining different patterns for Kubernetes cluster upgrades. The full...
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Do you know how to say no?
People often feel guilty for saying no to opportunities, but in reality you should say no when you really care about something but know you are not the best person. It doesn’t matter if you’re not interested, if you...
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Shipping code that doesn’t catch fire
Sometimes I push code into production that I’m certain will work well. Not because of test coverage or PR reviews, but usually just because the change was so simple and obvious there couldn’t possibly be...
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Practice
I’ve been on a diet and I’m pretty sure this cat has better sit-up form than I have. Just like anything we do it takes practice and if we don’t do it for a while we fall out of form. As much as I exercised in high school I have to...
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Hidden work
I never thought about how donuts were filled. I should have guessed it was someone’s job, but I assumed it was automated. It makes me realize there’s a lot of work I never think about.
There is lots of work I do that no one else...
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Balance
Learning how to ride a bike requires you to balance in new ways. Riding a bike on a tight rope requires similar balance, and I can only image the perceived risks of failure makes it exponentially harder to focus.
Trying anything new...
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One more feature
It’s difficult with software to know when to stop and release what you have. There’s always one more feature to create and one more bug to squash. Putting out software you know has bugs or doesn’t do everything you want is...
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Company presentations and movie magic
I often watch conference talks from companies that appear to be complete internal products, but behind the scenes are more like the blackbird car in the gif above. Companies have high performance, purpose...
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The weight of nothing
Sometimes we make decisions in software and design that appear to have no impact on what we’re building. After many years of unchecked decisions we may find our systems breaking from a million — seemingly weightless —...
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HTML
There were some conversations on Twitter this past weekend that HTML is not a programming language. I don’t care about semantics, but I DO care to recognize people that write HTML as developers.
My first full-time job I wrote code to...
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Open Source
There’s been a lot of open source news this week between my current employer and Elastic. I have nothing to do with it directly, but it reminds me that open source is people which means there will always be drama.
Even when it’s...
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Learning to code
The more programming languages I learn the more it resembles human language for me. It takes a lot of practice to write content that humans want to read. It takes similar practice to write code that computers want to...
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Learning new things
The gif reminded me of what it feels like to be new to something. You think you know where you’re going, you start to understand what you’re doing, and then you’re free falling. You pull the rip cord, gain a resemblance of...
Since this is the 1st newsletter I’ll explain how it works. I’d like to help you learn development or become a better developer. I also want you to look forward to opening this newsletter.
Over the past year I have had great opportunities to interview for positions at companies I respect, and some I didn’t. I wanted to share my experiences to help others looking to go down this job path and some general interviewing tips.
This post...
