Code, Noted· 2 min read
The bus factor has a literature
Knowledge concentration can be measured from the repository itself, and researchers have been doing it for a decade. On the number nobody computes until the resignation.
#knowledge#teams#risk
Leadership
10 articles
· 2 min read
On the engineering memoir
A quiet genre is doing documentation's best work: the practitioner explaining, in public, how their own system actually works. Notes toward taking it seriously.
#writing#documentation#learning
· 5 min read
The homelab argument
The strongest case for running servers in a closet has nothing to do with the servers. A long essay on small systems as professional education.
#operations#learning#self-hosted
· 2 min read
In praise of the quiet quarter
No incidents, no migrations, no launches. A short argument that the uneventful quarter is an engineering artifact, and that someone built it.
#operations#leadership
· 3 min read
Best practice has an expiry date
Microservices were mandatory in 2016 and apologized for by 2023. An essay on why engineering wisdom decays, and how to date a practice before adopting it.
#practices#microservices#judgment
· 2 min read
Engineering ladders and load paths
Career ladders are load-bearing structures. What an organization promotes for is what its systems will eventually be made of.
#leadership#careers#incentives
· 2 min read
The meeting that replaced the design doc
Organizations drift from written design to verbal consensus one calendar invite at a time. What the written form was doing, and how to notice it going.
#leadership#design-docs#writing
· 2 min read
Staff engineers and standing systems
The senior IC role was formalized around new construction. The harder and rarer craft is stewardship of systems that must not fall down.
#leadership#staff-engineers#careers
· 2 min read
The platform team's second act
Every platform team is founded to pave roads and judged, three years later, as a toll booth. The second act decides which one it becomes.
#platform-teams#leadership#devops
· 1 min read
On reading other people's postmortems
The industry's best literature is filed under incident reports. A short note on reading them for structure rather than schadenfreude.
#incidents#learning