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  • Porco Rosso's Home Lab - keeping the seaplane airworthy

    Testing Product in the Field

    DevOps: there is no QA, there is no infra, testing and support are everyone’s job. This works okay for unit test level work, but end to end functionality involving multiple teams breaks all the time. You can ask DevOps to take that on too, but they’ll just laugh. You can ship without doing any, and…

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  • A raccoon shown twice in a pink and turquoise 1980's junior high graduation photo format, captioned "I'm sorry for being annoying, it will happen again"

    Shewhart Control Charts

    As a monitor writer, I want to alert when a value has changed quickly a lot in one direction or another, but i don’t want to set hard-coded thresholds because the value’s range is expected to slowly evolve. My goal is to get useful alerts and avoid false alarms. Examples: A machine makes washers. If…

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  • Composition VIII, a 1923 abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky

    Centralization or federation

    What’s better, a centralized system or a federated one? As per usual in systems architecture, that depends on what values you’re optimizing for. Centralized is good for ease of use: there is one entity to configure, one system to learn. Decentralized is harder, but enables experimentation and discovery: there are many entities with different economic…

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  • captain of spaceship finishes exchange of views by revealing his dangerous but ultimately successful gamble.

    Towing mines as strategy

    Finding product market fit is notoriously difficult, am I right? Also, water is wet, and pricing is hard. Anyway, I’ve written a bit on the problems of founding a new product, differentiating features from products, and iterating a product until it works. It’s hard when you’re with a team or working on your own. But…

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  • The ambitious-yet-easily-perplexed black ops site director begs his technical wizard to make everything easy to understand

    Get the developer out of the way!

    I’d be so much more productive if I could get rid of this other person who keeps asking hard questions about exactly what I mean and exactly what I expect! Just make the spaceship go to Mars, okay?! Remember when the thing that was going to dis-intermediate software developers was visual IDEs? With XML data…

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