I didn’t do that well in physics. It was one of the engineering requirements for a CS degree, but I wasn’t that interested, pushed it off as long as possible, didn’t spend much time on it, and immediately forgot most of what I’d learned moments after taking the exam. Fast forward a bunch of years, […]
Category Archives: Performance
A number of years back, I saw that my company was going to be facing a particular challenge, and that we could get ahead of it if we took some risks and made some difficult but important changes immediately. If we waited for the crisis, the problem would be that much worse, and it would […]
We completed performance evaluations in January, and one of the conversations I’ve been having with my team members is, “what can you do to be a star in 2017?” It’s an important discussion to have, for a couple of reasons. First off, most people haven’t even considered the question. They have the idea that stardom is some […]
It’s almost inevitable. At some point your boss is going to pull you aside or ask in a meeting, “Can’t you make the team work harder?” Sometimes this is in response to a project that’s slipping, sometimes they just don’t feel that the team “has a sense of urgency.” After all, how committed could they be […]
I love to cook. I love wandering through a grocery store looking for interesting ingredients, paging through cookbooks, chopping vegetables, measuring, mixing, sautéing, baking. As a programmer / manager, I don’t have that many opportunities to make something physical, but cooking is an intensely pleasurable experience, especially when the results match the intentions. Unsurprisingly, I don’t like […]
My uncle held on to his 56k modem for years. We tried, and tried, to persuade him to switch to broadband, but he was absolutely convinced that 56k was all that he would ever need or want. It wasn’t about the money, or the hassle, or an intentional desire to limit his internet use – he had […]
In 1997, Clay Christensen published the landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book he went through a variety of industries (hard drives, backhoes, steel mills) and demonstrated the frustratingly similar pattern of how companies innovated, then stagnated – for entirely rational reasons. The key graph looks like this: The idea is that for any product, […]
I came to IM late. As a GenX-er, it wasn’t one of the communication tools I’d grown up with, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t caught on at the various companies I’d been at before my startup. So when a girlfriend suggested I get online so that we could chat during the day, I didn’t […]
One of the things about being in operations is that it introduces you to a whole host of concerns, features, and disciplines that you’d otherwise take completely for granted. In the same way that you rarely think about the work that goes into maintaining the sidewalk outside your house, or the massive international infrastructure devoted […]
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: […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 