Category: Industry
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The Ambassador from Ruritania
Being a developer advocate is a bit like being an ambassador in another country. Your ceremonial roles sometimes hide your real negotiations and strategic power.
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Guardrails and Plimsoll Lines
In an era where we have to assume that our data is being collected, and the data we collect, I think we need to get more nuanced about our guardrails. We need to think about what the worst possible outcome is, and then what the worst likely outcome is. We need to consider the dangers in different…
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How long has this been going on?
It’s easy to feel like AI* was the domain of science fiction and IBM moonshots until ChatGPT burst onto the public consciousness like Kool-Aid Man. It’s easy, but it’s not correct. What even is AI? LLMs have been around a lot longer than that, fixing your spelling and grammar and missed semicolons at the end…
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Book review: Kill It With Fire, by Marianne Belotti
I read this book slowly, not because it is long, or difficult, but because it is incredibly thought-provoking. Belotti has spent time doing the grinding work of upgrading the brownest of fields, and has managed to retain a sense of curiosity and fresh thinking that comes through in every example. The book’s layout is clear,…
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The costs and benefits of incremental improvement
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I got budget to build out a home studio to give talks in. It was about three thousand dollars, with a nice digital camera, a mic, pre-amp, and lights, and some bits and bobs. I even painted a wall in my basement. I’ve given a lot of talks…
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Platform engineering is the tool library of the enterprise
Last year I did a very cute talk about platform engineering through the lens of Animal Crossing, and talked about hospitality, and infrastructure, and what it should feel like to use an internal platform. Today I adjusted the brakes on my bike and trike. It involved significantly less swearing and bleeding than the last time…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…