Tag: Think Big

Sharing Is Caring

Sharing Is Caring

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Last week I recorded a Q&A video session with a colleague for an upcoming team all-hands meeting. Ostensibly we were there to speak on the benefits of a recently-deployed internal tool that’s become quite popular. But the value comes not from the tool itself, but from those whom it empowers to easily share their work.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/05/14/the-most-successful-developers-share-more-than-they-take/

Maybe it’s just the self-reflection inherent to middle age (I turned 43 a month ago), or the heartfelt email my team received this weekend from a recent customer, but in some small way I hope that when I’ve gone I’ll have contributed my portion to the ongoing corpus of human knowledge, and further, that I was able to utilize said knowledge for the greater good. The only way for that to happen is to maximally share what I build whenever possible, whether through open source code repositories, high-quality documentation, or even this blog (modest though it may be). It takes extra work, but the work is worth it.

Resolute Comprehension

Resolute Comprehension

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I really like New Year’s resolutions. As a lover of habit, the beginning of a year is perfect time to calibrate a new routine. This year I have two resolutions:

  1. Post on this blog at least once per month
  2. Learn a new programming language

The latter was inspired by this article, which is stupidly long but thoroughly enjoyable. As a non-fan of OOP I found myself nodding along quite frequently. He advocates pretty hard for functional languages; while I’m familiar with the paradigm having used it in Python, I haven’t done much with purer forms. In 2022 I intend to change that, probably by learning Clojure.

Erlang and Go are also on my to-learn shortlist, the former for its first-class support for concurrency, the latter because it’s the new hotness for performant APIs.

In other news, I’m working on publishing my first CDK construct, which I’ll share here when it’s ready. I do wish I didn’t have to write it in TypeScript, but sadly I’m at the mercy of the JSII compiler. Why TS doesn’t have first class support for comprehensions boggles my mind. This is the closest I could get:

Array.from(nodeProps.entries()).map(e => new HyperledgerFabricNode(scope, `Node${e[0]}`, e[1]));

Compare that with a Python equivalent:

[HyperledgerFabricNode(scope, f'Node{i}', p) for i, p in nodeProps.enumerate()]

For shame, TypeScript. For shame.

It’s A Small World

It’s A Small World

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Several weeks ago I recorded a half-hour talk for our big annual kickoff meeting. It turned out to be quite the production, with ring lights and lav mics and a team of people helping me set up and run the recording. Not to mention the time that went into prepping the content and having it peer reviewed and copy edited.

There was a moment amidst the mayhem when I wondered if it was worth it, especially considering all my other responsibilities. I briefly thought about calling it off altogether. But it’s an honor to be selected in the first place, so perseverance was appropriate.

Turns out it has been a singularly rewarding experience hearing positive feedback on the session. Not just from my own team, but from people all around the world. Twelve countries at last count (in order by timezone):

  • Myanmar
  • India
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Israel
  • Sweden
  • Italy
  • Switzerland
  • Germany
  • France
  • England
  • Brazil
  • United States

I happily responded to every email and Slack message, even had a couple quick video chats about it. Pretty darn cool.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

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I’ve written before about the importance of writing documentation. Like anything else it’s a skill that takes both training and practice. The latter only takes time, but there’s not a lot of material out there on the former. Therefore it made me happy to discover Write The Docs, a global community of people who care about documentation.

The recommendations in their Beginner’s Guide To Writing Documentation I found quite helpful. And loved this quote, which is only tangentially related to docs:

Fear is what happens when you’re doing something important. If you are doing work that isn’t scary, it isn’t improving you or the world.

The article argues that writing documentation for yourself and others is one way to alleviate fear, and I agree. So go forth and write!

Put A Bow On It

Put A Bow On It

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I spent a bunch of time over the holiday cleaning up some Python tools I’ve written, and packaging them up for easy distribution via an internal PyPI repository.

The endless list of things to learn never ceases to amaze me, in this case I got to play with tox for matrix testing/packaging, and twine for publishing. Also got a lot better at writing setup.py files and integrating quality tools like flake8 and safety.

Here’s a couple helpful write-ups that I found when researching best practices for Python packaging:

Packaging a Python library
Python packaging pitfalls

In the course of the above, I also found it necessary to inquire about modifying an open-source tool for measuring code coverage. Turns out it was easy enough to make the modification and submit a PR to the maintainer. If you’ve never contributed to an open-source project, I highly recommend it!

No True King

No True King

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Recently I’ve revisited thoughts I’ve had about what it means to be a senior engineer. One summary I came across that I liked was making the move from “delivering” to “leading”.

And another I gleaned from an email Eric Raymond sent to Linus Torvalds regarding the latter’s over-reliance on his own genius. While not sent in the context of senior-level engineering, I think it’s still informative of an attitude adjustment that must be made when taking on the mantle of leadership:

The bill always comes due — the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your native talent alone doesn’t cut it any more. The smarter you are, the longer it takes to hit that crunch point — and the harder the adjustment when you finally do.

There will come a time when your raw talent is not enough. What happens then will depend on how much discipline about coding and release practices and fastidiousness about clean design you developed before you needed it, back when your talent was sufficient to let you get away without.

I would add “ability to delegate and elevate the work of those around you” to that last paragraph. It’s hyperbole to say that every line of code written by an engineering leader represents a failure, but I coach up-and-coming senior folks to think that way nonetheless.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

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Today I came across this statement from Alfred North Whitehead, and instantly loved it as an extension of my previous post on abstractions.

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

That to me is the essence of abstractions. Not that one needn’t ever be required to dig down into the implementation details, but that the layer on top of those details enables them to be ignored to an increasing degree.

Incidentally, this is the second Alfred North Whitehead reference I’ve come across recently, the first being a mention of his book Science and the Modern World in one of my favorite podcasts. Something tells me I need to dive deeper.

It’s Been Awhile

It’s Been Awhile

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Howdy friend. It’s been quiet here for some time now, but as is typical around a new year, I’m renewing my efforts to stay active on this blog (especially since I’ve mostly stopped using social media). This is in no small part to me now working for AWS Professional Services as a Senior Consultant in the public sector, a role for which improving my writing will be particularly valuable.

My silence should not be interpreted as inactivity, because a heck of a lot has gone down since I last posted:

  • Got promoted to the Director of Engineering for a 20+ person team (this actually happened in late 2017 but I’ve never mentioned it here)
  • Led that team through a painful acquisition process that required reducing the team by about a third
  • Experienced the joy of having a paycheck delayed by two full weeks during the holiday spending season
  • I celebrated my 40th birthday with a trip to Germany and Ireland
  • Was laid off when my employer ran out of money, without warning and with no final paycheck (about this much more could be said, but going to keep it short for now)
  • Dipped my toes into independent consulting for a few months while searching for a new job
  • Was hired by Amazon as a Senior SDE to work on their Last Mile team (the folks that get packages from delivery stations to your doorstep)
  • Transferred to AWS as I mentioned above

Pretty bonkers 18 months, but things are starting to settle down, and I’m eagerly anticipating the new normal of 2020. More to come!

An Apple A Day

An Apple A Day

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Anyone want to speculate on how many .DS_Store files and other MacOS cruft have been inadvertently uploaded to Google Drive, Dropbox, etc? Every time I see these things it’s a reminder that when designing a system, one should never assume it’s always going to be used within whatever comfortable little ecosystem the engineer envisions for it.

The Bible Of Software Engineering

The Bible Of Software Engineering

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One of my all-time favorite passages on software development.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month