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What are you afraid of?
If you ask me what I’m scared of in life, I’ll tell you things like financial insecurity, poisonous snakes, and losing loved ones. Pretty typical. However, if you look at my behavior, the thing I work hardest to avoid is boredom. Until we had reliable books on our tiny pocket computers, I always had a…
Leaving LaunchDarkly
Startup years are a little like dog years – 5 years at a startup is a lot of experience. When I started, I was employee 21, our office elevator was a bit dodgy, and we could all eat lunch together. Now LaunchDarkly is a globally-distributed organization with hundreds of employees. Over the years, I’ve gotten…
Value-Stream Baader-Meinhof Mapping
More than once yesterday, I ended up explaining value-stream mapping. Wikipedia says: Value-stream mapping, also known as “material- and information-flow mapping”,[1] is a lean-management method for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of events that take a product or service from the beginning of the specific process until it reaches the…
Deserted Island Devops: We Live in a Society
Platform engineering is great — but would it work on a desert island?
The new normal of staffing, conferences, and work
We have to change how we think about staffing and add in a lot of expensive redundancy. I thought about this originally in the context of in-person events, but it’s honestly true for every part of work and life. We have to change how we do planning and team coordination—not because we’re remote, but because we’re understaffed.
When you stare into the blank page, it stares back at you
I didn’t write The Great American Novel during the pandemic. I’m good with that. Instead, I worked with an amazing team to write the best book we could on how to do technical writing when you are not a technical writer. I finally believe this book is really real, because look, there are pre-order buttons!…
In which I am cranky about the urban/rural divide
I just came back from a weeks-long trip to the American West. It was amazing, gorgeous. You know what all this beauty has in common? Besides mostly being protected wild areas? Zero bars of cell phone signal. Or maybe like, two bars, depending on whether there was a mesa in the way. We drove almost…
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