Category Archives: Uncategorized

Small differences in the productivity of software developers on a team can easily magnify themselves over time. On many software teams, one engineer seems significantly faster than the others. Now, in some cases, it’s because that engineer is cutting corners left and right. They get stuff done, but they cause damage. They’re a tactical tornado.Continue reading “A Small Difference in Developer Productivity Can Amplify Over Time”

On my product engineering teams, I under-specify product requirements by design. That is, the work that engineers are asked to do is always left a little ambiguous. I used to have a very naive view of how militaries made decisions. You had a formal chain-of-command, and detailed instructions were passed down that chain and implemented,Continue reading “Mission Tactics: When Under-Specifying is Good”

Most architectural mistakes I’ve seen in software stem from a mistake either in the domain model or the data flow. Understanding what each of those two things is, how to do them both well, and how to balance the tensions between them is an essential skill every developer should invest in. Let’s use an exampleContinue reading “Good Architecture: Data Model vs. Data Flow”

Another day, another HackerNews discussion about hiring being broken. The most recent one I saw was triggered by a blog post by the formidable Aline Lerner (disclaimer: Aline is a friend and we collaborated on a hiring book last year). Now, I 100% agree that hiring is broken, and Aline’s post is really thoughtful. InContinue reading “4 Hiring Myths Common in HackerNews Discussions”

The term technical debt is so common that you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the software world that hasn’t heard of it. But what is technical debt? There are a few frameworks out there, so I’ll list them quickly, but then I’d like to present one I’ve found especially useful with the teams IContinue reading “The Shape of Technical Debt”

I was reading an amazing Twitter thread about Bill Grundfest, founder of The Comedy Cellar and the guy who discovered some of the most famous comedians. In the thread, which includes stories of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Ray Romano, the pattern is essentially: Bill is able to detect talent, even early on in people’sContinue reading “Hire people you believe in—believe in the people you hire”

I loved this quote from the book Software Engineering at Google. Found it a helpful reminder. Earlier we made the assertion that “code is a liability, not an asset.” If that is true, why have we spent most of this book discussing the most efficient way to build software systems that can live for decades?Continue reading “Code is a liability, not an asset”

Of all the advice I’ve gotten in my career, the one I wish I’d gotten (and heeded) earlier was to just write more. Up until two years ago, I had barely written much at all. In the past two years, I went from writing short answers on Quora, to writing several articles featured on theContinue reading “How I Started Writing More”

I was talking to my friend Josh a couple weeks ago about the speed at which teams move and how best managers can create a sense of urgency. We pretty quickly agreed that there are two types of urgency for a team: push-based and pull-based. I felt like this is an important delineation, and wantedContinue reading “Push vs. Pull-based Urgency”

HN Discussion Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24543510 I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and asked to derive what the value of y will be as x grows to infinity. One thing you learn pretty quickly aboutContinue reading “Is Revenue Model More Important than Culture?”