Social Signaling is the idea that people, through actions or even words, may be trying to get others to believe something about them. A simple example might be trying to signal you are smart by using big words. Or conversely, trying to signal you’re a chill bro™ by using all those latest slang words and…

The narrative of Greatness          My kindly professors always tried their best. They worked hard, spoke passionately, and assigned impressive tomes to be purchased at a markup. They took themselves and their job seriously, and gave all indication that they believed they were relaying facts. That passing down truth was their job.          But they weren’t…. or…

Here are a bunch of things (good) feature-team engineers do on every that infrastructure engineers should really start doing: These may sound obvious, but in practice I rarely see these things done. For example, suppose you want change from CI/CD tool A to CI/CD tool B, and you’re claiming the change will improve reliability/speed/uptime/whatever. If…

“How would you rate your knowledge of techonolgy X out of 10?” Is a terrible question, and here’s why. It’s entirely ambiguous, and depending on which interpretation you give, there’s really no wrong answer. On an obsessively literal level there are reasonable interpretations of the question such that most candidates would say 10, not out…

I’m mildly annoyed by the type of pseudo-coherent thoughts that are apparently the norm around the idea of DevOps: “DevOps is a philosophy,” “DevOps is obsolete,” “Platform engineer is the new term,” blah blah. Here’s a timeless way to look at it, free of all hype and buzz, a take that’s as true now as…

After a particularly difficult one-on-one with a stubborn direct, Jay took a moment to reflect and center himself. The report’s claim, though posed at him abrasively, had actually been interesting – “OKRs are simplistic bullshit, you know no complex system can be boiled down to these isolated measurements. If anybody seriously believed in OKRs we’d…