Why it’s so hard to externalize stuff
I’ve been chatting with somebody about helping them externalize software they built for an internal application, and it reminded me of a gnarly problem I fac...
Posts by Year
2022
The stoplight model for assessing promotion readiness
Want to be promoted?1. Tell your manager2. Ask them for a bullet point list of things they’d need to see from you to feel comfortable promoting you3. Continu...
Reserved seating vs general admission and system design
That makes no sense. It’s still a finite number of tickets.— Caryn Rose (@carynrose) November 17, 2022
Looking for the next thing
After five months off, it’s time to look for the next thing.
2021
Ground-breaking computer games
Now that many are talking about the ZX Spectrum due to the passing of Clive Sinclair. It would be remiss of me to add that Mike Singleton’s “The Lords of Mid...
2020
Does education boost IQ?
Why school is so important, distilled: Each year of schooling increases IQ by 1-5 points, and these effects persist for a lifetime. This meta-analysis conclu...
Phillip Robinson Certain, 1943 - 2020
Note that normally these blog posts are simply the concatenation of a tweet thread. In this case, it’s the transcript of a video reflection I made about my f...
Pecan Pie and Chocolate Chess Pie
On to pies! While the request was for pecan, I’m also going to talk about chocolate chess pie, which I love even more than pecan!
Cornbread
Can I give you a cornbread recipe? For sure? Can I do it without writing a twitter thread about my cornbread journey? Well, I could, but… If you want to cut ...
Women Who Inspired Me
Happy International Hey Guy, Maybe Talk About A Woman Who Inspired You That Isn't Your Wife, Mother, or Daughter— Mx Ann Dry (@anngav) March 8, 202...
What’s Really Holding Women Back
My promotion to VP/DE became official on March, 1. Coincidentally, on that day, I also ran across this article, which really resonated with me. I’m going to ...
I’ve been promoted!
Something very surprising happened today: I got three characters back in my bio! I’m not sure what to do with them: suggestions welcome!
2019
Latency, Throughput, and Walking on Escalators
A constrained space such as an escalator can comfortably hold more than twice the number of standing pedestrians as walking pedestrians. So stop walking up t...
The Universal Scalability Law and the Mythical Man Month
The challenge with adding more engineers to a project. Just moving from 3 developers to 4 doubles the number of lines of communication. pic.twitter.com/TkI2N...
What does P-four-nines (p99.99) mean?
Was in a conversation about some service refactoring and the guy said “mean latency was a bit worse, but our P-four-nines was rock-solid and only twice th...