I’ve spent my tech career alternating between large and small companies, from very large ones like Comcast and Capital One to small local shops you’ve never heard of. In part one of this two-part series, I’m going to look at a few of the things that are good and bad about working at very large companies.

The Good

1. They’re always hiring

Looking for a job under a bit of a time crunch? There’s a very good chance one of the very large companies in your area is hiring. Companies like Comcast and Salesforce are practically always hiring — they have so many seats to fill…

There’s a lot to know about databases. They’re complex mission-critical applications that sometimes require specialized subject matter experts to maintain them, but that doesn’t mean that they’re some kind of magic black box either. Databases are the backbone of our applications, and the more you learn about how they work, the better you will be at using them, writing applications against them, and troubleshooting problems when things inevitably go wrong.

So let's dive into seven things you should (probably) know about databases.

Note: Unless stated, I’m typically going to be talking about relational databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL and not…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some deep-diving into databases as part of my day-job effort to migrate our existing Postgres 9x databases to something more recent, like Postgres 13. As an SRE I don’t typically have much exposure to the database layer of the applications that I support beyond making them available and ensuring migration scripts and the like run successfully. But this deep-dive has allowed me time to get to know our databases and their structure and to see some of the inner workings of our applications. Out of this has sprung a few articles so…

Look, I get it. Databases are rarely sexy. No one really likes talking about indexes, or data de-normalization, or stuff like that. But like it or not databases have a fundamental and important role to play in just about every modern application, whether those databases are large multi-region, multi-replica data warehouses that span hundreds of terabytes, or small embedded or in-memory databases; each database has a role to play in its ecosystem. But outside of the in-memory or embedded databases like Badger or SQLite one of the most challenging problems is actually managing those databases over the lifetime of the…

We’ve all seen the articles. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those ones. Simple, reductive headlines like “RECURSION IS BAD” or “WE NEED TO STOP USING IF/ELSE” from people who just discovered functional programming. And look, it's fine to have differing opinions about things, code styles included, but there’s a threshold where you cross from pedantic to dogmatic. And if we’re honest, it's getting a little out of hand. So I decided that someone need to step up and defend the “code smells”, the basic building blocks of how real, actual production code works.

If/Else is OK

I’ve seen way way way…

Its 2AM on a Monday night. I’m sitting here at my desk while my wife and two kids fast asleep two floors above me. For the past three hours I’ve been aimlessly browsing the internet looking for a spark of inspiration. Craigslist, Angel.co, HackerNews, and even Quora have seen visits from my IP address while I lazily try to find something that I can stick my overworked brain into. Googling “software startup ideas” seems pretty pathetic and vague but here I am. After all, what else am I going to do? We all exist in these little self-contained bubbles now…

Sometimes I really hate being right. Less than two weeks ago I published an article called “Culture Doesn’t Matter”, in which I outlined a very simple idea: that company culture doesn’t matter unless its actively lived by the leadership. Then just a few days later, Basecamp-gate happens.

For those of you who don’t already know what happened at Basecamp, my colleague John Breen summed it up pretty succinctly on his own blog:

A few days ago, Basecamp, a tech darling helmed by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, announced some policy changes. These changes effectively ban Basecamp employees from “societal…

I’ve done a lot of interviews. A lot. It’s not something I am particularly proud of because the implication is that I’ve looked for a lot of jobs, but it is what it is. There’s a benefit to doing a lot of interviews, though, and that is you start to understand what works and what doesn’t, different interview styles, and eventually some baseline takeaways. This is what I’m going to share with you today.

Communication Is Key

When interviewing in a “professional” setting (eg, not a fast-food or other low-skill or entry-level setting) there’s an important differentiator that sets apart your potential workplaces…