- Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — Adding technology to your company comes with a cost. As an abstract statement this is obvious: if we’re already using Ruby, adding Python to the mix doesn’t feel sensible because the resulting complexity would outweigh Python’s marginal utility. But somehow when we’re talking about Python and Scala or MySQL and Redis, people lose their minds, discard all constraints, and start raving about using the best tool for the job.
- Dunning-Kruger and Other Memes — a reality check on the popsci conception of some psych research.
- Sharing our Engineering Ladder — In addition to the ladder causing problems inside of my team, we were having a hard time evaluating candidates during interviews and determining what level to hire them into. Particularly at the more senior levels, it wasn’t clear what the criteria for success really looked like. So, together with my tech leads and engineering managers, we rewrote the ladder to be more specific. It has been very helpful both for the process of reviews and promotion committees as well as for the process of hiring.
- Ikea’s flat-pack refugee shelter is entering production (The Verge) — The UNHCR has agreed to buy 10,000 of the shelters, and will begin providing them to refugee families this summer. […] Measuring about 188 square feet, each shelter accommodates five people and includes a rooftop solar panel that powers a built-in lamp and USB outlet. The structure ships just like any other piece of Ikea furniture, with insulated, lightweight polymer panels, pipes, and wires packed into a cardboard box. According to Ikea, it only takes about four hours to assemble.
"management" entries
What you need to consider before moving to management
Assessing the many paths to a management role.
You’ve been at your company a while, maybe as little as a couple of years, maybe substantially more, and the idea of moving into management has crossed your mind. The idea can occur for any number of reasons. Maybe you found out that there’s an opening, either internally or at a different company. Maybe someone from management has asked if you’re interested. Maybe you’ve been in your current position for a while, and it’s not as challenging as it used to be. Maybe you’ve been unimpressed with the management at your company, and you think you can do a better job. No matter what the situation, you’re suddenly faced with the idea of becoming a manager. Is jumping to management a leap you’re ready to make, and what are the alternatives if you don’t?
Read more…
Four short links: 31 March 2015
Boring Technology, Psychology Memes, Engineering Ladder, and Flatpack Refugee Shelters
Signals from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015
From careers to culture to code, here are key insights from the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015.
Experts from across the software architecture world came together in Boston for the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015. Below we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.
Software architects: post-“post-useful”
The old notion of a software architect being a non-coding, post-useful deep thinker is giving way to something far more interesting, says Neal Ford, software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks. “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing … it’s trying to solve real problems rather than play with abstractions.”
Four short links: 18 March 2015
Moonshots, Decacorns, Leadership, and Deep Learning
- How to Make Moonshots (Astro Teller) — Expecting a person to be a reliable backup for the [self-driving car] system was a fallacy. Once people trust the system, they trust it. Our success was itself a failure. We came quickly to the conclusion that we needed to make it clear to ourselves that the human was not a reliable backup — the car had to always be able to handle the situation. And the best way to make that clear was to design a car with no steering wheel — a car that could drive itself all of the time, from point A to point B, at the push of a button.
- Billion-Dollar Math (Bloomberg) — There’s a new buzzword, “decacorn,” for those over $10 billion, which includes Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Uber. It’s a made-up word based on a creature that doesn’t exist. “If you wake up in a room full of unicorns, you are dreaming,” Todd Dagres, a founding partner at Spark Capital, recently told Bloomberg News. Not just cute seeing our industry explained to the unwashed, but it’s the first time I’d seen decacorn. (The weather’s just dandy in my cave, thanks for asking).
- What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like — aside from the ugliness of “impactful,” notable for good advice. “When engineering management is done right, you’re focusing on three big things,” she says. “You’re directly supporting the people on your team; you’re managing execution and coordination across teams; and you’re stepping back to observe and evolve the broader organization and its processes as it grows.”
- cxxnet — “a fast, concise, distributed deep learning framework” that scales beyond a single GPU.
Four short links: 6 February 2015
Active Learning, Tongue Sensors, Cybernetic Management, and HTML5 Game Publishing
- Real World Active Learning — the point at which algorithms fail is precisely where there’s an opportunity to insert human judgment to actively improve the algorithm’s performance. An O’Reilly report with CrowdFlower.
- Hearing With Your Tongue (BoingBoing) — The tongue contains thousands of nerves, and the region of the brain that interprets touch sensations from the tongue is capable of decoding complicated information. “What we are trying to do is another form of sensory substitution,” Williams said.
- The Art of Management — cybernetics and management.
- kiwi.js — a mobile & desktop browser based HTML5 game framework. It uses CocoonJS for publishing to the AppStore.
What is DevOps (yet again)?
Empathy, communication, and collaboration across organizational boundaries.
I might try to define DevOps as the movement that doesn’t want to be defined. Or as the movement that wants to evade the inevitable cargo-culting that goes with most technical movements. Or the non-movement that’s resisting becoming a movement. I’ve written enough about “what is DevOps” that I should probably be given an honorary doctorate in DevOps Studies.
Baron Schwartz (among others) thinks it’s high time to have a definition, and that only a definition will save DevOps from an identity crisis. Without a definition, it’s subject to the whims of individual interest groups, and ultimately might become a movement that’s defined by nothing more than the desire to “not be like them.” Dave Zwieback (among others) says that the lack of a definition is more of a blessing than a curse, because it “continues to be an open conversation about making our organizations better.” Both have good points. Is it possible to frame DevOps in a way that preserves the openness of the conversation, while giving it some definition? I think so.
DevOps started as an attempt to think long and hard about the realities of running a modern web site, a problem that has only gotten more difficult over the years. How do we build and maintain critical sites that are increasingly complex, have stringent requirements for performance and uptime, and support thousands or millions of users? How do we avoid the “throw it over the wall” mentality, in which an operations team gets the fallout of the development teams’ bugs? How do we involve developers in maintenance without compromising their ability to release new software?
Four short links: 4 December 2014
Click to Captcha, Managing Hackers, Easy Ordering, and Inside Ad Auctions
- One Click Captcha (Wired) — Google’s new Captcha tech is just a checkbox: “I am not a robot”. Instead of depending upon the traditional distorted word test, Google’s “reCaptcha” examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.
- The Responsive Enterprise: Embracing the Hacker Way (ACM) — Letting developers wander around without clear goals in the vastness of the software universe of all computable functions is one of the major reasons why projects fail, not because of lack of process or planning. I like all of this, although at times it can be a little like what I imagine it would be like if Cory Doctorow wrote a management textbook. (via Greg Linden)
- Pizza Hut Tests Ordering via Eye-Tracking — The digital menu shows diners a canvas of 20 toppings and builds their pizza, from one of 4,896 combinations, based on which toppings they looked at longest.
- How Browsers Get to Know You in Milliseconds (Andy Oram) — breaks down info exchange, data exchange, timing, even business relationships for ad auctions. Augment understanding of the user from third-party data (10 milliseconds). These third parties are the companies that accumulate information about our purchasing habits. The time allowed for them to return data is so short that they often can’t spare time for network transmission, and instead co-locate at the AppNexus server site. In fact, according to Magnusson, the founders of AppNexus created a cloud server before opening their exchange.
Four short links: 1 September 2014
Sibyl, Bitrot, Estimation, and ssh
- Sibyl: Google’s System for Large Scale Machine Learning (YouTube) — keynote at DSN2014 acting as an intro to Sibyl. (via KD Nuggets)
- Bitrot from 1997 — That’s 205 failures, an actual link rot figure of 91%, not 57%. That leaves only 21 URLs as 200 OK and containing effectively the same content.
- What We Do And Don’t Know About Software Effort Estimation — nice rundown of research in the field.
- fabric — simple yet powerful ssh library for Python.
Four short links: 26 June 2014
IoT Future, Latency Numbers, Mobile Performance, and Minimum Viable Bureaucracy
- Charlie Stross on 2034 — every object in the real world is going to be providing a constant stream of metadata about its environment — and I mean every object. The frameworks used for channeling this firehose of environment data are going to be insecure and ramshackle, with foundations built on decades-old design errors. (via BoingBoing)
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know — awesome animation so you can see how important “constants” which drive design decisions have changed over time.
- Extreme Web Performance for Mobile Devices (Slideshare) — notes from Maximiliano Firtman’s Velocity tutorial.
- Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (Laura Thomson) — notes from her Velocity talk. A portion of engineer’s time must be spent on what engineer thinks is important. It may be 100%. It may be 60%, 40%, 20%. But it should never be zero.
Everything is distributed
How do we manage systems that are too large to understand, too complex to control, and that fail in unpredictable ways?
“What is surprising is not that there are so many accidents. It is that there are so few. The thing that amazes you is not that your system goes down sometimes, it’s that it is up at all.”—Richard Cook
In September 2007, Jean Bookout, 76, was driving her Toyota Camry down an unfamiliar road in Oklahoma, with her friend Barbara Schwarz seated next to her on the passenger side. Suddenly, the Camry began to accelerate on its own. Bookout tried hitting the brakes, applying the emergency brake, but the car continued to accelerate. The car eventually collided with an embankment, injuring Bookout and killing Schwarz. In a subsequent legal case, lawyers for Toyota pointed to the most common of culprits in these types of accidents: human error. “Sometimes people make mistakes while driving their cars,” one of the lawyers claimed. Bookout was older, the road was unfamiliar, these tragic things happen. Read more…