Culture

On Being A Senior Engineer

October 25, 2012

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that might shed light [...]

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Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it

January 5, 2012

While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about what how things worked at [...]

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Systems Engineering: A great definition.

July 18, 2011

Ben Rockwood said something last December about the re-emergence of the Systems Engineer and I agree with him, 100%. To add to that, I’d like to quote the excellent NASA Systems Engineering handbook’s introduction. The emphasis is mine: Systems engineering is a methodical, disciplined approach for the design, realization, technical management, operations, and retirement of [...]

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Training Organizational Resilience in Escalating Situations

May 10, 2011

This little ramble of thoughts are related to my talk at Velocity coming up, but I know I’ll never get to this part at the conference, so I figured I’d post about it here. Building resilience from a systems point of view means (amongst other things) understanding how your organization deals with failure and unexpected [...]

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Resilience Engineering: Part I

April 7, 2011

I’ve been drafting this post for a really long time. Like most posts, it’s largely for me to get some thoughts down. It’s also very related to the topic I’ll be talking about at Velocity later this year. When I gave a keynote talk at the Surge Conference last year, I talked about how our [...]

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MTTR is more important than MTBF (for most types of F)

November 7, 2010

This week I gave a talk at QCon SF about development and operations cooperation at Etsy and Flickr.  It’s a refresh of talks I’ve given in the past, with more detail about how it’s going at Etsy. (It’s going excellently ) There’s a bunch of topics in the presentation slides, all centered around roles, responsibilities, [...]

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Slides for Velocity Talk 2009

June 23, 2009

UPDATE: blip.tv has the video of the talk as well, below. Jeez I have some major bed-head. That was a blast! I had never done a ‘duet’ talk before. Here are the slides: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr …and the video of it is here:

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