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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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  • Captain Jean Luc Picard and Lieutenant Worf stand in an starship looking concerned at loud commotion, chicken clucking

    Uptime nines aren’t equally distributed

    Once upon a time, I worked at a hosting company… sadly, after a hardware upgrade gone wrong, the database server behind a customer’s website was sitting open on a data center floor with a cracked motherboard during their launch event. We provided an overall yearly uptime better than three nines (99.9%, or 52 and half

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  • Zuko commiserating that Sokka's girlfriend turned into the moon

    You’re a CISO? That’s rough, buddy

    I had the opportunity to speak candidly with several CISOs (Chief Information Security Officer) and CSOs (CISO plus physical security) at RSA this year. I heard lots about challenges, and it’s not surprising that the tenure is so short. There’s a lot to unpack in the data behind those articles, but this is a product

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