Recent Articles - Career

Amortize Your Learning by Writing How-To Guides
Amortize Your Learning by Writing How-To Guides
Mar 4, 2024 · 6 min read

The time required to learn something new can be large, but you can make that cost worth it by teaching it to others.


Discussion Guide: The Staff Engineer's Path
Discussion Guide: The Staff Engineer's Path
Nov 7, 2023 · 7 min read

A guide with discussion prompts for Tanya Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Path.


Discussion Guide: The Unicorn Project
Discussion Guide: The Unicorn Project
Nov 6, 2023 · 8 min read

A guide with discussion prompts for Gene Kim's The Unicorn Project.


An Effective Incident Runbook Template
An Effective Incident Runbook Template
Nov 3, 2023 · 8 min read

A structured incident runbook that is tailored to your organization's needs is an essential tool in your SRE documentation.


Avoiding Blanket Statements
Avoiding Blanket Statements
May 6, 2022 · 6 min read

One part of emotional intelligence is understanding how our words impact others.


Retrospective Techniques
Retrospective Techniques
Feb 4, 2022 · 7 min read

Retrospectives need to be productive and engaging or participants will quickly tune them out. Here are some techniques to hold more interesting retros.


Code Review Comment Prefixes
Code Review Comment Prefixes
Nov 6, 2020 · 4 min read

Regardless of what style of code reviews you use, code reviews in general are an important tool to share expertise and improve quality, but sometimes the intention of comments can be lost.


Being Critical of Past Developers
Being Critical of Past Developers
May 14, 2020 · 2 min read

How were those past developers of this project so very wrong?


SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs: What Are They?
SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs: What Are They?
May 11, 2020 · 5 min read

You might have heard these terms in reference to commitments with vendors or customers, but what are they, and why should you care?


Pull Requests Welcome™
Pull Requests Welcome™
Feb 15, 2020 · 5 min read

Developers like to complain. We'll complain about lack of documentation, lack of tests, choice of framework, choice of linter settings, and so on. My response to it? Pull requests welcome.


The Concept of Deployments
The Concept of Deployments
Aug 23, 2019 · 8 min read

Pupils dilated. Sweaty palms. Tingly legs. You lean in. A world of opportunity lays before you. You close your eyes…and wait. Deployments.