I've spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They're clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in…

It’s been a long, long Monday. You get home from work, eat dinner, clean up, flop on the couch, and doze off watching TV or mess with your phone. Then you repeat the same routine Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Before you know it, you’ve hit the weekend, and it felt like all you did all…

Designing Event Driven Systems – Summary of Arguments This post provides a terse summary of the high-level arguments addressed in my book . Why Change is Needed Technology has changed: Partitioned/Replayable logs provide previously unattainable levels of throughput (up to Terabit/s), storage (up to…

A little over three years ago, I left my job at Social Media Company Who Shall Not Be Named to join Lyft as an Engineering Manager leading the DevOps team. I had two main goals: the first was to dramatically accelerate my growth as an engineering leader, and the second was to find the freedom to…

Translations: Italian Russian I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general. Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of…

03 Aug 2015 Feed 302 up Image by : Photo by Becky Svartström. Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 4.0 x Get the newsletter Join the 85,000 open source advocates who receive our giveaway alerts and article roundups. Patricia Torvalds isn't the Torvalds name that pops up in Linux and open source…

Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads…

Tekin Süleyman @tekin Tekin Suleyman is a freelance consultant who’s been shipping Ruby code for over a decade. He’s worked with teams, large and small. He also runs the North West Ruby User Group in Manchester. In one timeline a quick path to clarity. In the other a long and painful journey trying…

Welcome to Monday Methods! Today's post will be a bit longer than previous posts because of the topic: Holocaust Denial and how to combat it. It's a rather specific topic but in recent weeks, we have noticed a general uptick of Holocaust Denial and "JAQing" in this sub and with the apparently…

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…

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 hardly ever felt…

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…