Technology Commentary

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do next. I was torn between two different paths: (1) leading engineering at a very small startup, or (2) taking a much smaller role at a fast growing company, with the expectation that growth would create opportunity.

The good and the bad. It's all ugly.

From two ports bridges to SmartSwitches

WT.Social, Mastodon, Slow Social, Sundayy: Alternatives to #Facebook, #Twitter and the like keep proliferating as devs look to build a better social network. #socialnetworks #developers

“Okay, now I'm being asked "What should Elon do to fix Twitter?" It looks like the takeover succeeded (easiest hostile takeover ever! I suspect the board secretly wanted to work with Elon, because WELL IT'S ELON).”

Posted on Wednesday 27 Apr 2022. 725 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

Apple says that Server's most popular features have been integrated into macOS.

Just keep it under wraps.

With the recent news of Twitter’s board accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, some folks are talking about leaving Twitter. In the long scheme of things, being founded in 2006 makes Twitter a young company, but the internet is different and over the past 16 years it’s become a central platform for many folks working in the technology field (among many others). Twitter has become especially important for folks writing content online, to the extent that it’s the most effective distribution mechanism for many writers.

Rob Green spoke about the changing world of advertising and its shortcomings at the 2018 Digiday Video Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona.

BitTorrent usage has bounced back because there's too many streaming services, and too much exclusive content.

Amazon’s new Buy With Prime announced the arrival of Amazon Logistics as a Service, and is a big red flag for Shopify.

Obsidian enables you to create a set of linked documents with Markdown, supporting the creation of a knowledge base.

Meta, Microsoft and Intel are investing billions in developing this virtual world, but what if it turns out to be not that interesting?

Work cultures have undergone a dramatic change in the past two years. Data, automation and edge computing will transform everything.

The business benefits of network automation are sometimes lost in discussion about technology and tools. Guest Tim Fiola joins this episode of Heavy Networking to discuss how to engage the business at a cultural level so that network automation is properly embraced and supported by management.

Captions on this page: Evolution of cellular automata with a sequence of different possible rules,... – from A New Kind of Science

Are you constantly shipping features and cutting corners? Then you might be working at a Feature Factory. Here are 12 symptoms: No measurement of impact. Rapid shuffling of teams and projects. Success theater around “shipping”. Infrequent (acknowledged) failures and scrapped work. No connection to core metrics. No PM retrospectives. Obsessing about prioritization. No tweaking. Culture … Continue reading "12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory"

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…

We’ve raised $17M from Bessemer, Kindred, Conversion Capital, BoxGroup, Offline Ventures, and others to make securing, using, and managing sensitive data a snap for developers.

Is this number small or big ? I don’t know

An explanation of my Network Anyverse Strategy. Normal practice for data networking was that technology was narrow: fixed bandwidth, focus on selected technology, and there were only service I  loo…

How an experimental take on stirrups—a.k.a. the things you put your feet in while riding on a horse—led to a longstanding debate among historians.

Read the story of Pattie Maes—the woman who invented the core principles behind social media. Learn how she shaped the online social networks we know today.

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command.