Articles Trunk and Branches Model Rules of scaling infrastructure organization Rule One: You must maintain service qualtiy high enough that your leadership team doesn’t throw you out Rule Two: You must maintain a sizable investment budget to prevent exponential problems from sinking your organization Corollary One: If morale is too low…

Articles Fail Open and Layer Policy a sufficiently generic implementation can last forever, but intentional restrictions tend to evolve rapidly over time; if infrastructure maintainers want to avoid rewriting their systems every year or two, then we need to be able to tweak policies to enforce restrictions while independently maintaining and…

Articles 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known About 99% of the time, the right time is right now. Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes. When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers. Productivity is often a distraction…

Articles New graduate EU offers — is It possible to negotiate? Journey of EU MLE offers and the negotiation process Should you use Let’s Encrypt for internal hostnames? it aids reconnaissance for attackers. Having a “map” of your internal infrastructure is useful it might expose some vulnerabilities — depending on how…

Articles My Twitter journey from 100 -> 30k followers 100 → 200: extremely difficult, demotivating, and I had no idea what I was doing. 200 → 1,000: committed to build an audience seriously on Twitter. I bought a Twitter course, learn the basics, get to know the “algorithm”, tried everything. 1,000…

Articles Using Gamma Distribution to Improve Long-Tail Event Predictions Using weights obtained from gamma distribution to better model long-tail data First, we find the best-fit gamma distribution for the delivery duration data. In our case, we found α=4 and β =1 to have the best fit. Next, we set the weight…

Articles Stabilize, Modularize, Modernize: Scaling Slack’s Mobile Codebases Modularization: breaking apart our app target into smaller components to reduce interdependencies, decrease build times, and allow independent development Improve build times Allowing developers to build and test their code on smaller targets Improving the overall structure of our codebase through clearer separation…

Articles Learning By Lurking Learn hidden details of projects by lurking, join channels or mailing lists liberally, and improve documentation. How to run a Digital Platform at Scale for a platform to be able to be manageable at scale, it needs to be opinionated Reduce boilerplate (not every service should be…

Articles Eye tracking reveals where people look during Zoom, Webex participants spent one-third of the time looking at something other than the computer screen Uber’s Emergency Button and The Technologies Behind It