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  • Person busking in a chicken suit in front of Los Pollos Hermanos, a restaurant from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad

    Roles and Requirements

    If you can’t fill a role, the real requirements and job definition will change. It’s instructive to look at what’s happened to field engineering. When I started out in the mid nineties, an SE (sales or solutions engineer) was responsible for making the customer successful from the first meeting to the (hopefully never occuring) last…

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  • this is your brain on drugs 1989 newspaper ad

    Silicon Valley Gets High On Its Own Supply

    Picture a typical Monday morning catchup with Slack. “Great news,” says Bob, “I was experimenting this weekend and AI can automatically extract, maintain, and translate strings! Now we can finally do that localization project we’ve been ignoring for years!” Leadership chimes in with “LFG!” A few hours later, the rest of the problem has surfaced.…

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  • A stop sign in berkeley california tagged with "hammertime"

    Always be Prepared for Hammertime

    I’ve had a laptop stolen at a conference. I also remember poor designs that meant a liquid spill would instantly kill a laptop. I have also changed jobs plenty, usually voluntarily. I have developed some habits that I recommend no matter how careful you are with equipment or what shape your job is in. Gear…

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  • A woman hits the wall with a hammer and is then shocked to find it made a hole

    2025 Blogging Review

    Posting 2025 was a busy year, and I didn’t get as much writing done as in prior years. My process hasn’t changed from that described here, but job, band, and fitness commitments have left me wrung dry. The weekly reminder to post something still goes off, but I have been ignoring it. In 2023 I…

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  • Harold Lloyd hangs from a clock hand above a busy street in a scene from Safety Last

    When to Build Reliability

    Features win sales. Lack of sales kills the company. Everyone in leadership can be focused on that as the wolf currently at the door. Most developers and product managers can agree as well; obviously we have to sell the bits to pay the people. What surprises us is that the features don’t have to be…

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