I got certified in pencil sharpening last week. Twelve modules. Forty hours. There was a capstone project. I sharpened a pencil. It was a #2 pencil because, yah. I'm now a Certified Pencil Sharpening Professional (CPSP). Felt important. The course covered the history of pencils. The philosophy of…
I wrote another book! He's an outline of whats inside. Chapter 1: Type words into an API integration. Chapter 2: Change the words slightly. Chapter 3: Tell stakeholders you're "tuning the model." Chapter 4: Change the words slightly again. Chapter 5: Change the words…
Yup! I still remember my engineering mentor showing me my first white paper in 1995. I didn't understand a word of it (for real it was way over my head but he was a savant). But I knew someday, I too would share my learnings with the world.…
(Continued from: "Your Technical Interviews Suck!" ) I get together with a group of engineering leaders regularly, and this topic continues to come up and we roll our eyes and laugh. 𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐀𝐋𝐊 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄 🎤 Since 1996, I’ve never found myself in a situation where I’m working, then suddenly brought before…
I meet regularly with engineering leaders. Startups to Series C. 25-30+ years in the game. WE'RE OLD, OK? GET OFF MY LAWN! Anyway, the same topic always comes up: hiring. Engineering leaders!!!!! Your PRs get more scrutiny than your candidate. You seem to spend 3 weeks debating a…
We put a rover on Mars. I bet your services still need a hardcoded IP to say "hello world". Somewhere right now, a senior engineer is grepping through YAML files to find out why Service A can't talk to Service B. The answer is in an…
I Love a Simple API Gateway Service Are they necessary? No. Are they simple to set up? Yes. Will I defend this hill? Only because I already built a small fortress on it and I'm not hauling those sandbags back down. I don't always use them.…
I've never had a good answer for "why I'm in software engineering." It's like asking why breathing is awesome. In 1994 I found Geocities, Perl and Javascript. These combined, was a dopamine hit of instant creation. I built for fun. Then for…
We built a global infrastructure on the assumption that some guy in Oakland would keep paying for his domain registration. Remember when an npm package broke the internet with a single deploy? I do. FORK. YOUR, DEPENDENCIES. VENDOR. THEM. VERSION LOCK THEM. Yes, it feels paranoid but know what else…
My first introduction to IAC was Ansible in about 2015. Writing playbooks instead of SSHing into boxes and running commands like some kind of digital archaeologist. Suddenly infrastructure was repeatable which alone felt like magic. Then Terraform. YAML with remote state in S3 for version control was next for me.…