Category: Uncategorized
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Norton’s Law
There’s a great xkcd about the 10,000 people hearing about a thing for the first time today:.. so perhaps today is your day for hearing about Norton’s Law. In 2015, Quinn Norton wrote Norton’s Law in Hello, Future Pastebin Readers. To wit: over time, all data approaches deleted, or public.…
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Post-job whiplash
Most salary jobs in tech come with large amounts of pressure: team sizes are designed to be small, roles are “flexible” in that everyone has more than one, and the migration to SaaS adds on-call responsibilities to roles that didn’t have them before. Companies pivot, they reorganize their teams into…
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Managing Situations
I’ve written a bit about managing situations in corporate life. Whether managing up, down, or all around, everyone in the corporate machine has to face changes, renegotiate their responsibilities, make a plan, and act. For some this is as natural as breathing, for others it is a huge and recurrent…
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User Experience Principles
I have worked with some fabulous user experience designers who have really changed the way that I thought about a problem. A great designer can get into someone else’s head as an artist, can generalize from observation as a scientist, and can develop and communicate their design like an engineer.…
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AI for Monitoring
Cognitive computing approaches to the monitoring problem haven’t worked in the past and still don’t work now. The future might still make it work, but it’s unlikely to be because of a change in AI technology unless that change is in the per-process execution economics. For AI to be a…
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Task Scheduling and Slippage
Enterprise systems have a lot of things that need to happen. If they all happen at the same time, you’ll either overload your constrained resources or overload the budget attached to your elastic resources. Plus, some of these things are supposed to occur at a specific time, and others should…
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8 Key Takeaways from Observe’s 2023 State of Security Observability Report
https://hackernoon.com/8-key-takeaways-from-observes-2023-state-of-security-observability-report
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Tell, or Do?
A product finds a thing, a situation, a problem. The queue is full! There’s a lot of high severity vulnerabilities! The message handler stopped handling messages! Now the product developers have a choice to make: should they do something, or tell someone? Unfortunately not everyone wants the same decision at…
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Unified Product Operations Process
Process is what people do, not what they say. In other words, what we say is aspirational, what we do is factual. If you describe what the people are doing now, you’ll be very successful in establishing a process for new hires to follow. But what if some teams don’t…
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Infrastructure as Code Sucks
Tasks to be done with a product can be thought of as points on a circular graph. That graph is a series of concentric bands, where each band is constituted of the people who can (have the ability and the permission to) do the task for the product. At the…
