One of your key team members just quit. A top performer, she’d slotted into the team as though she’d always been there, and quickly become your go-to person for several key initiatives. Now you’re wracking your brain, trying to figure out what just happened. Things were going so well, why is she leaving? Was it […]
Author Archives: Dan
I’ve been working in DevOps for just about exactly one year now. Different companies call their teams different things, but at TripAdvisor we divide Operations into the following buckets: TechOps: Live site hardware. This includes managing the data centers, racking and kickstarting servers, setting up firewalls, routers, load-balancers, networking, DNS, bandwidth, certs, and so on. SiteOps: […]
For the last six and a half years, I’ve worked in a “speed wins” culture of quick iterations, speed of execution, done is better than perfect. A culture that believes that the faster you go, the more you can iterate, the closer you can curve-fit to the user’s needs. Of course, it doesn’t always work […]
Culture can be top down, or bottom up. The big commandments come from on high (“Speed wins!” “Done is better than perfect!” “Don’t be evil!” “Worse is better!”), and everyone scurries to figure out what they mean and how to make them happen. Eventually, a company will settle into a rhythm (hopefully sounding more like […]
Not much time for a full report this month, so just a quickie before turning in. Bottom line is that while the sheer tonnage of snow dumped on Boston has been a pain in the ass, shoveling snow is really good aerobic exercise. And, I must say, a Roku streaming stick + Amazon Prime has made […]
The old-timers have it, of course. They started it, built it, went through hell to ship it, stepped up and created something from nothing in the midst of one disaster after another. You bet your ass they feel a part of what they created, feel like part of a special club, know with a justifiable sense […]
This is going to be brief. First, because I don’t have anything deep and meaningful to say about habit, reward, and personal improvement this month. And second, because I was on call and up all weekend with a neverending stream of devops emergencies that had to be addressed, and I desperately need the sleep. [As […]
The three numbers in the universe that matter most are zero, one, and many. Think about life – tweak the fundamental physical constants a little, and you can imagine a universe in which it never happened. Never could have happened. Or maybe it’s so astonishingly unlikely, such a bizarrely, unimaginably low probability – the equivalent […]
I was running late. I needed to get to work and was on my way out the door when I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to make lunch. Not a big deal – I usually just slap a PB&J together – but I was already late, bundled up and mentally on my way. It was going to be […]
In a recent post I talked about some gotcha-type questions / Java quirks, but there’s a more fundamental gap that I see all the time – primarily in coders who have never been forced to program in C/C++ at some point. There are some basic pieces of knowledge, some tricks of the trade that everyone […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 