Archive of posts with category 'software'

People: what are they good for anyway?

People: what are they good for anyway?

Your technology is NOT your primary asset. Unless your company is in FAANG or your CEO’s world president, other teams are bigger assets. Your people and your networks are your true assets. An AI-driven world will make the ‘other teams’ even more important. It’s all about the people in the...
Reading time: 11 minutes
Diverse interests help us understand the world better

Diverse interests help us understand the world better

Having a diverse set of interests allows you to look at the world in different ways. Pick up a weird hobby, or a new craft. If nothing else, it’ll help you do your job better.

Reading time: 6 minutes
Bringing lessons from Japanese temple constructions to software maintenance

Bringing lessons from Japanese temple constructions to software maintenance

Don’t entomb your applications. Make them flexible, be ready to make gradual changes. That way, they won’t need an overhaul from scratch when the time comes.

Reading time: 10 minutes
A tale of the treacherous task of Kubernetes upgrade

A tale of the treacherous task of Kubernetes upgrade

This is a tale of unmitigated blast radius in networking. I broke two of our developer environments the second day of joining the infrastructure squad. We discovered several potential issues with our workflow and engineering practices. Let me explain how that happened, and what we did to fix it. We’ll...
Reading time: 9 minutes
Infrastructure management: from chaos to Cloudformation CDK to confusion

Infrastructure management: from chaos to Cloudformation CDK to confusion

Our team decided to use Amazon’s infrastructure-management tooling versus other available tooling a while back. We are now reconsidering the decision.

Reading time: 5 minutes
Don't hoard your engineering players, let them out in the field

Don't hoard your engineering players, let them out in the field

Well-run organizations can fall into the trap of ‘hoarding’ their star engineers. They keep them ‘on the bench’, they don’t deploy them for risky, challenging projects. That’s an unnecessary inefficiency. As in sports, allowing your strongest players to go play in the field gives them practice. It also improves general...
Reading time: 4 minutes