Letterbook Featured Letterbook We build tools, but we are also shaped by the affordances of those tools. I'm building Letterbook. I would like it if you join me.
Sociotechnical systems Mental maps, part 2: incidents and observability We map the system so that we can change the system, so then we must remap the system. That's the tight inner loop of software development.
Sociotechnical systems Mental maps for navigating software systems Learning and exploration in complex systems happens continuously, forever. We need to constantly update our mental maps, or they'll lead us astray
DevOps Automate Thyself For quite some time, my own ops haven't had much dev in them. But I'm changing that.
Advent of Code in Production Advent of Code in Production, Day 13: Observability At this point we've designed a system and we're going to provide it as a service. To operate that service effectively we have to understand how its behaving. That's all about observability.
Advent of Code in Production Advent of Code in Production, Day 7: Incident Review If Advent of Code was a whole system, it might look like this. Of course, the first deployment of a complex system is never smooth. This is a review of that incident.
Advent of Code in Production Advent of Code in Production, Day 6: Operating Environment Let's talk distributed systems! Getting into the details of how we could build a whole system to support Santa's elves, instead of a bunch of scripts.
Engineering Dimensions of Scalability We are part of the systems we build. When those systems scale, that includes us. The approach we take will determine how successful and how painful that scaling will be.
Process A Bug's Life I've written before about useful metrics for software development organizations, and it's past time for another. The metric I'm proposing now, I call "A Bug's Life". Because who doesn't like Pixar? And it's descriptive. What is
Process (How to) Be Solution Oriented There's a piece of advice I've often heard regarding being successful in your job. Actually there are a lot, but the one I'm think of is that you should not bring problems to your manager, and instead bring solutions. Or more generally, focus on
