2018

This month, I want to highlight an article by Hiten Shah, Why Trello Failed to Build a $1 Billion+ Business. This article uses Trello as a case study of how Software as a Service can grow a viable business, but leave considerable growth on the table. I see a lot of corollaries between this Trello case study…

This month, I want to highlight an article by Evan Martin, Ninja. Evan details a build system he created with the goal of building Chrome faster. Evan walks us through why he created Ninja, how he views optimization, and several tricks he used to continue to optimize his build system as the complexity grew over time. http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html…

This month, I want to highlight an article by Dave Thomas, Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility). Dave is an original signatory and author of The Manifest for Agile Software Development, and has key insights in this article about staying true to the roots of agile, and avoiding dogmatic practices. I love this short blog, it…

This month, I want to highlight an article by Riot Games, A Taxonomy of Tech Debt. Tech debt is an overloaded term. This article defines four types of tech debt (Local, MacGyver, Foundational, Data), and describes how to determine the most impactful tech debt to tackle. I found this article extremely clear and relevant to general engineering…

This month, I want to highlight an article by Joel Spolsky, The Law of Leaky Abstractions. This article was recommended to me by an Amazon engineer, I find this concept applies well when we design systems, as it helps us remain cognizant of our system’s weaknesses. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions “TCP is a way to transmit data that is…