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, […]
Category Archives: Performance
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every company optimizes for something. Sometimes this is an external measure – price, quality, security, customer service, etc. Sometimes it’s internal – hiring, project/risk/change management, and so on. Of course every company wants to do everything perfectly, but when you look at how they make decisions, there’s usually a central organizing theory. At TripAdvisor, the […]
I spent a couple of hours on Sunday putting together some IKEA furniture – a table, some chairs, a couple of cabinets with toy bins. My five year old son unexpectedly took an interest, my wife and two year old got in on the action, and a tedious process turned into a full family adventure. […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 