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The last 10% is the hardest.

If you’d told that version of me what I’d be earning a decade later, he wouldn’t have believed you.

How to grow as a leader, without career ladders.

Don't use phrases like "unlikely" or "almost certainly." Here's real-world data showing why not, and what to do instead.

Why can't you leave a sealed envelope unopened? Professor Hannah Fry begins by refusing to allow Michael Stevens to open a mystery envelope addressed to him. A small act of torture that turns…

Practical ways to replace us-vs-them thinking with shared ownership

Practical ways to replace us-vs-them thinking with shared ownership

Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"

We argued that SREs should get involved and skill up on generative AI tools and techniques, instead of being naysayers and peanut gallerians.

When we launched Digg v4, the old site turned off, but the new site didn’t turn on. There was a lot of pressure to get things working, but no one knew what to do about it. It took almost a month to…

Priority is singular

This is the second post in a short two part series about leadership and honesty.

Every mature system is carrying around lessons that were never written down. They’re encoded as validations, retries, timeouts, workflows, and exceptions. The implementation remembers. The…

Programming didn't die all at once. There was no single moment, no dramatic obsolescence event. Instead, something quieter happened: the core constraint that shaped software for seventy years…

From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal…