2020

This month I want to highlight an article, The Wrong Abstraction, by Sandi Metz. This article discusses the long-term effects of augmenting your abstractions, removing the initial tightness of the abstraction to accommodate one-off behaviors. Your code, once clean and concise, become fragile and error-prone. The author advocates for removing the abstraction to understand the…

This month I want to highlight an article, The Science-Backed Secret To Rapidly Improving Any Skill, by Jude King. The article discusses how quick and reliable improvement comes from producing results, receiving feedback, and adapting. This lesson applies to all aspects life – our personal skills, our products, and our businesses; we often see this…

This month I want to highlight a blog, It Is Never a Compiler Bug Until It Is, by Russell O’Connor. The author finds a bug in the GCC compiler, and after fixing his code, demonstrates senior engineer behavior by checking for the bug in the rest of his code base. This behavior demonstrates terrific Ownership…

This month I want to highlight an article, Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You, by Steve Yegge. In addition to Google’s propensity to cancel full products, Google is equally known for fully deprecating platform APIs. While our services must evolve to accommodate the changing business landscape, we must also maintain customer-centricity by…

This month I want to highlight a blog, 5 arguments to make managers care about technical debt, by Nicolas Carlo. Although often maligned, technical debt is not objectively bad. Technical debt is similar to monetary debt; they are tools that enable us to borrow today in order to accelerate tomorrow. In practical terms, a business…

This month I want to discuss an article Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking (author unknown). This article describes the principle: reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. We see this principle reflected in many areas of our professional lives. For example, one Amazon…

This month I want to highlight an article Why we rewrite (even when we shouldn’t), by Ben Northrop. This article touches on a variety of different influences that drive our decisions, and ultimately reminds us to use objective data, where possible, to set the best possible direction.  https://www.bennorthrop.com/rewrite-or-refactor-book/chapter-3-why-we-rewrite-even-when-we-shouldnt.php “In his amazing book on decision making…

This month I want to highlight an article Testing sync at Dropbox…and how we rewrote the heart of sync with confidence, by Isaac Goldberg. This article describes how Dropbox rewrote their sync engine (the engine that powers Dropbox on hundreds of millions of customer machines) and swapped it out mid-flight. The team decided that Dropbox’s…

This month I want to use Zoom’s security issues to highlight why security is one of Amazon’s highest priorities. As a result of worldwide shelter in place orders, human connection technology usage has spiked to unprecedented levels. Zoom, a remote conferencing product suite, has added more monthly active users in Q1 2020 than in all…

This month I want to highlight a named problem, The XY Problem. The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. The XY problem has been documented since the 1980s, and I continue to see it today. It is natural for us to work towards solutions and ask for help…