Posts
Tinkertoys, Microservices, and Feature Management (ScaleConf 2019)
I got the video from my trip to ScaleConf in Capetown, South Africa. This talk is an interesting trick, because I don’t talk about testing anywhere in the title or summary, but it’s really all about how testing is a vital part of microservice architecture, and how testing needs to change to work with feature…
Book Review: Academic Slide Design by Ann E. Fandrey
This book says “Academic”, but it’s also an excellent resource for the person writing technical/software presentations. We often face the problem of trying to convey really important concepts in a way that serves people who are primarily listening to us as well as people who are reading the slides, either because they don’t speak the…
A Parable of the Polar Vortex
The best time to shovel your driveway is immediately after it snows, but failing that, any time before you have driven on it. Driving on fresh-fallen snow compacts it into something between “ice” and “pure evil”, depending on the temperature, humidity of the air, humidity of the snow, etc. I just went out and shoveled…
The Year That Was 2018
A wrap-up of my year’s travel, including links to conference talks, and photos of places I’ve been.
Choose Your Own Deployment
I love the aha moment people get when they grasp a concept. It’s a lot of what gives me energy about this job. Being there to help people see how an abstract concept can make their concrete life better is amazingly rewarding. Because of this, I try to change up all the parts of my talks,…
The Art of Booth
I originally wrote this up as an internal blog post, but I think it may be useful for other people, too, so I’ve cleaned it up a bit and taken out most of the proprietary stuff, and added some explanations. I had never in my life done boothwork before this job, so I was surprised…
“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” —Rachel Zoe
Colored hair has never disrupted my ability to do my highly-visible, public job, either. Almost every form of dress code you can think of is about asymetrical respect – the less powerful person is forced to comply with power’s standards of hair/clothing/expression. https://t.co/yB5RGz9JpD — Heidi from LaunchDarkly (@wiredferret) January 15, 2019 I look like this:…
My favorite talk of 2018
This is the talk that I saw this year that has changed my thinking the most, that I have referred to most often. Fixme, by David Heinemeier Hansson
The naming of cats… or feature flag patterns
Eeee! I’m super excited to start this year because something I’ve been working on for a while is ready for all of you to look at! Feature Flag Glossary It’s hard to use a pattern, or even imagine it, if you don’t have a name for it, so we put together all the names for…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
DeliveryConf