Key Takeaways Time waste is often caused by these 5 “time thieves”: too much WIP, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, neglected work and conflicting priorities The first step to improve flow is to make waste visible to everyone in the organization With visibility comes the ability to measure and…

THIS JOB IS UNDOING ME

I t’s been quite a journey going from being born on a commune to raising more than $87 million in funding at a software company. It’s one that has forced me to wrestle with existential questions about my true beliefs, and how they intersect with my life as an entrepreneur. One’s work is rarely a…

Before the term “ information technology” existed to label the field, learning COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was the only sure way to ensure a lifelong career in IT. Developed in 1959 in part from a previous language design created by the legendary Grace Hopper, COBOL was an early…

Redis is the often unspoken workhorse of production. It’snot often used as a primary data store, but it has a sweetspot in storing and accessing ephemeral data whose loss canbe tolerated – metrics, session state, caching – and itdoes so fast , providing not only optimal performance, butefficient…

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 thinking about being a manager. I really like engineering, but I feel like I’m just solving the same problems over and over…

Photo: Minecraft How to Raise a Boy is a weeklong series centered around this urgent question in the era of Parkland, President Trump, and #MeToo. My dad left us when I was 2, owing to a drug habit he wouldn’t or couldn’t break. I was young enough that I have only a handful of memories of him, and I…

In this article, perhaps the first in a mini-series, I want to explain the concepts of streams and tables in stream processing and, specifically, in Apache Kafka. Hopefully, you will walk away with both a better theoretical understanding but also more tangible insights and ideas that will help you…

Over the last few years, static type checkers have become available for popular dynamic languages like PHP ( Hack ) and JavaScript ( Flow and TypeScript ), and have seen wide adoption. Two years ago, a provisional syntax for static type annotations was added to Python 3. However, static types in…

The World View All The Iranian president on Monday warned that Donald Trump will ‘surely’ regret pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran… US President Donald Trump on Sunday said there will be a “big price to pay” after what he called a… 18-year-old Nigerian student, Ruti Olajugbagbe, has won the…

Recently I spoke at the Pipeline Conference in London . I gave a talk on “Optimising Continuous Delivery” to a bunch of people who were self-selected as interested in Continuous Delivery, most of them would already consider themselves CD practitioners, Pipeline is a conference dedicated to learning…

Cool scars 4eva. Here’s what it feels like when I have a seizure: I start hearing a woman’s voice. Sometimes it’s an elderly Russian woman, sometimes it’s a younger woman, but in all cases it is a caregiver to a young boy. I cannot make out what scene is being played out in my thoughts, just a…

I feel like an idiot while doing my job. A lot. Now there’s a damn good chance I’m actually an idiot, but the self-respecting part of me wants to challenge that notion. When I get stuck on a task or am looking for recommendations for tools/resources/strategies/solutions/whatever, I often take to…

What does your job look like day to day? What’s your favourite aspect of it? Most of my day is spent in various types of meetings! I spend a lot of my time having one-to-one chats with my direct reports, peers, and skip levels. You might also find me in more strategy-related meetings, giving or…

I n 1999, the acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai released Kadosh . Internationally screened and widely praised, it was one of the first Israeli films set entirely within the country’s ultra-Orthodox (ḥaredi) community. The story of a loving married couple forced to separate by the religious…

After nearly thirty hours of flying through three airports and a four-hour drive down bumpy dirt roads, our product team made it from our office in San Francisco to Rwibaale, the rural community in western Uganda. This is where we built Watsi Coverage , our community-based health insurance platform.…

A common question we hear is "How do I use Clojure for real?" Not the language basics, but the practicalities of building software – questions like how to structure the project file tree and namespace hierarchy, how to write tests, or how to use the REPL. This post tackles a small subset of this:…

In 2013, Jason Kottke wrote a prediction for Nieman Lab’s year-end roundup: “ The blog is dead, long live the blog. ” Kottke was then (and still is) owner of one of the longest continuously running blogs on the web: kottke.org , founded in 1998. “Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In…

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is twelve best practices for building modern, cloud-native applications. With guidance on things like configuration, deployment, runtime, and multiple service communication, the Twelve-Factor model prescribes best practices that apply to a diverse number of use…

Talking Technology: Nick Rockwell + Charity Majors This is the first in a series where New York Times CTO, Nick Rockwell, talks to leaders in the technology world about their work. Rockwell interviewed Charity Majors, the co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, about observability software, debugging and…

Annual weekend retreats at resorts or hotels, known as shabbatons, are staples of Jewish organizations’ calendars, where members learn, pray, strategize and bond together. It’s normal for shabbaton organizers to plan ahead to ensure their kosher needs are met, but it’s rare for them to ensure that…

Between 2014 and 2016 my working life went through a lot of changes but the worst one was the normalization of slack. Managers like it because it ‘gets things down on paper’, ‘improves reachability’, ‘gets questions answered quickly’. My argument is that it destroys teams’ ability to think, plan &…

On May 29, 2017, I wrote a response to LambdaConfs’ purposeful invitation of misogynist Ed Latimore as their keynote speaker. I had already received considerable harassment on Twitter due to my speaking up about the event, but shortly before I was due to publish my response, Breitbart picked up the…

In December 2015, I wrote a story about the potential uses of the gene-editing technology known as CRIPSR. That piece, based on a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C., quoted six men and one woman. The six men included five scientists and one historian, all quoted for their professional…

This is a brief aside from my ongoing series about avoiding entityservices. An interesting dinner conversation led to thoughts that Ineeded to write down. Amdahl’s Law In 1967, Gene Amdahl presented a case against multiprocessingcomputers. He argued that the maximum speed increase for a task wouldbe…

6 Subtle Ways You Might Discriminate During Résumé Review An unfortunate truth of hiring is that reviewing a résumé is a process riddled with bias . It’s ruled by opinion and lacks oversight: there are few consequences to making a gut call and marking “Not Right Fit”. Techniques like résumé blinding…

T he small burgundy satchel bore the hallmarks of rugged craftsmanship: top-grain leather, double stitching on the straps. It was wider at the bottom, sort of like an inverted funnel, and two buckles secured the flap. Babak Behzadzadeh knew exactly how he might use the bag when he saw it hanging in…

Robert Mueller is not impressed. Alex Wong/Getty Images Over at the Gothamist, Jake Offenhartz has an astounding and richly symbolic story about the latest bit of “fake news” burped up by the alt-right. At Columbia University on Monday, alt-right self-promoter Mike Cernovich gave a speech to College…

Folding Tradeoff Space automation changes the rules we play by Fast v Safe Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Choose between safety and speed, stability and flexibility. More of one sacrifices the other. fast or safe, we are somewhere on that spectrum I remember a time when this described our decisions…

At tonight's Glamour Women of the Year Awards, Goldie Hawn presented Reese Witherspoon with an award for her work creating stronger roles for women in film. The superstar's speech was so inspiring and powerful, you'll want to see every bit of it in its entirety. Watch the video and read every word,…

My answer to How to kumbaya with the remote team? on Ask MetaFilter Here’s a low-tech, high-impact trick I recently learned at work that’s amazingly useful: create a doc-of-docs. This is a Google Docs document containing links to all of the other documents, tools, dashboards, slack channels etc that…

Ben Thompson writes a reasonable-sounding yet largely wrong defence of the proposal to reclassify ISPs under Title I instead of Title II, beginning with a smart debunking of that Portuguese cellular pricing infographic you’ve probably seen: So to recount: one Portugal story is made up, and the other…

As a company, Meetup has long embraced its position as a small, mission-driven operation. While other social software companies from the Web 2.0 era, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, focused on keeping their users on their sites for as long as possible, Meetup’s purpose was always to get people off…

Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently Agile started off as a set of values . Values are subtle and abstract, so as agile spread, what spread wasn’t the values but the practice of working in cycles. Cycles are easy to explain and easy to copy. People in our industry think they stopped…

Pacific Press/Getty Images Feedback is crucial for learning and improving, but it’s rarely fun to be on the receiving end of it when it’s critical. Many people have a negative reaction to feedback, especially feedback on their creative work. In a study of seven companies and 11,471 days of creative…

I grew up in a family of leaders who fought hard to give people a voice. My father is a legal aid lawyer who spent his career fighting for the rights of migrant workers. My grandmother helped sex workers find housing, counseling, and support. So it was only natural that as I developed in my career,…

Many managers say flat-out that their biggest frustration is when employees are not prepared for a one-on-one meeting. Yikes, really? Over the past four years, I’ve heard countless of managers, CEOs, and business owners say a version of this to me: “During a one-on-one, I’ll ask a question and…

Technical interviews are garbage. Here’s what we do instead At Xtreme Labs, Farhan hired 1,000 people over four years. Technical interviews are a fantastic tool … if you want to hire candidates that are great at interviewing. But if you want people who are good at the job? Not so much. That’s why we…

From OSCON 2015 in Portland: Re-architecting a system is wrought with problems: - We almost always underestimate the difficulty of said task - We almost never completely understand our customers’ needs - The system almost always changes out from underneath us However, what we can sometimes forget is…

Brenda Atchison’s home in the Boston suburb of Roxbury has been in her family since 1946, and she’s lived there for nearly her entire life. At 66 years old, she’s an empty nester–she describes her house as rooms that are collecting dust. But expenses are rising and her ability to earn is dwindling.…