Perceiving the layers of context in problems will unlock another stage of career progression as a Staff-plus engineer, but there’s at least one essential skill to develop afterwards: navigating ambiguity. In my experience, navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds of problems.

Real-time app monitoring is about fundamentally shifting your mindset toward a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Most of Slack runs on a monolithic service simply called “The Webapp”. It’s big – hundreds of developers create hundreds of changes every week. Deploying at this scale is a unique challenge. When people talk about continuous deployment, they’re often thinking about deploying to systems as soon as changes are ready. They talk about microservices …

Twenty years after its debut, what is the role of the CAP theorem in modern-day distributed systems? Stumbling across the CAP theorem is like walking into a discussion (or a debate) already in progress. Imagine how others might feel walking into an argument amongst developers about which IDE is the

The CAP theorem asserts that any networked shared-data system can have only two of three desirable properties (Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance). In this IEEE article, author Eric Brewer discusses how designers can optimize consistency and availability by explicitly handling partitions, thereby achieving some trade-off of all three.

Discussing the piratical efforts to rip people off by counterfeiting computer hardware. It’s been happening for more than 40 years.

Above is a deranged version of the innovation curve that is often brought out when thinking about products (often tech products specifically). Here’s a better one: A very few people are “innovators” who are there on day one for new stuff and are willing to look past flaws or

This feels inevitable.

Creating a public database of NBA Apps

Self-describing content-addressed identifiers for distributed systems - multiformats/cid: Self-describing content-addressed identifiers for distributed systems

Free up some slack by tightening your language

This is a brain teaser. An idea find useful when discussing the pros and cons of real-life use cases and features.

MOCAS is the world's oldest computer program that's still in active use. It was launched in 1958 by the United States Department of Defense for keeping track of contracts and payments.

Now its functions are shattered between innumerable vendors

One of the most attractive things about language design is to be able to tweak the syntax of a lan…

LLVM used to be hailed as a great thing, but with language projects such as Rust, Zig and others c…

A new year: Reflection time

Why I decided to mostly move to Linux in 2024, and what I’ve learned in the process of that move.

When we talk about metrics, there is often an assumption that everyone in the company needs the same data to make decisions and this is dangerously incorrect. Different levels of the organization need different kinds of data to make effective decisions. Yet, all too often we use the wrong data at the wrong point.

Treating computing as a utility, like electricity, is an old idea. But now it makes financial sense—a historic shift that is reshaping the IT industry.

Working out how to apply Theory of Constraints in real-world situations can be hard, but there are two simple ways to kickstart it.

How the growth of Apple in the Enterprise is changing the way we think about productivity.

Why dependencies should be checked into version control.

One thing that often strikes me when sitting in on client interviews is how many candidates lack an historical perspective on software development. In a profession of “perpetual beginners&#82…

Why features would make product development easier, but don’t exist