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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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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I’m writing this the night of January 6, 2021. It won’t be posted tonight, because it’s not what anyone should be paying attention to. It’s useful to me to write something else, think about something other than a coup, a putsch. I am Extremely Online. If you follow me on Twitter, you are already aware...
Last night, part 87 of a perpetual discussion flared up again. The one about where you live and why it matters. It started with an article by Sean Blanda – Our Remote Work Future is Going to Suck. I encourage you to read the article, it’s not 100% right, but Blanda brings up excellent points...
Have you read Accelerate yet? If you haven’t, you might want to go read that one first and come back to Kersten’s book, Project to Product. When I think about how software is trying to reinvent itself, Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble is the book that presents the business case for...