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…

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…

You read that right. Company culture doesn’t matter. And why should it? Would you really pick your next position based off some namby-pamby feel-good words? I wouldn’t. Mission statements about “making the world a better place” or “building a sustainable future” sound great but what’s the point? Does anyone really care where their next paycheck comes from as long as it comes?

No.

No one cares about some stupid words on a business card or a website, because culture isn’t the words, its the actions.

You can have all the nice words and pretty visuals, the multi-cultural stock photos on…

Think back to the early days of your career. For me it was working as a lone-wolf sysadmin at a small regional retail company. I was still very green and was hired because they needed someone who could learn how reset passwords in Active Directory. I had no concept of the wider world of technology, the products and tools that existed in it, and the depth of the ocean I was starting to wade into. And just like everyone else that doesn’t know any better, I thought the best way to manage my resources (servers, desktops, etc.) was by hand…

When sitting down to start a new project, or figuring out a road map for an existing one, the options for actually running your workloads have never been more wide open. Admittedly, we live in an era where we are spoiled for choice when it comes to platforms; between open-source tools, paid services, enterprise offerings, and everything else available. This has made selecting the tools we use a bit more difficult as the chances of being paralyzed by choice grow with the number of choices available. With the growing number of options available to us these days its only fair…