Will Larson's Blog, page 18

Moving the finish line.

When I was a young boy, a cousin gifted me a copy of Steely Dan’s greatest hits. In that era of CDs and 56k baud modems, I didn’t have much new music to play, and over the summer I listened to that CD enough that bits and pieces come back to me despite not knowingly listening to a Steely Dan song in at least 25 years. One song in particular, Black Cow, has a lyric that occasionally comes to mind, “You should know / How all the pros play the game / You change your name.”

The lyric comes across si...

Your migration probably isn’t failing due to insufficient staffing.

Chatting with a friend recently, their company was running into a common developer productivity pitfall. The company had mandated a migration away from their monolithic architecture and mono repo, but the migration was stalling out. To speed up the transition, the responsible infrastructure team decided to stop supporting the monolith and instead focus on the new service environment. Two years later, engineers were quitting to avoid working on either side of the migration: both the new, incomple...

Founding Uber SRE.

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth.

After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do next. I was torn between considering two different paths: (1) leading engineering at a very small startup, or (2) taking a much smaller role at a fast growing company, with the expect...

Platforms change but cool URIs don't.

With the recent news of Twitter’s board accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, some folks are talking about leaving Twitter. In the long scheme of things, being founded in 2006 makes Twitter a young company, but the internet is different and over the past 16 years it’s become a central platform for many folks working in the technology field (among many others). Twitter has become especially important for folks writing content online, to the extent that it’s the most effective distribution m...

Interim assignments.

One of my favorite parts of senior leadership roles is that you periodically get to deep dive on something that you typically don’t focus on too closely. At Stripe, I got to serve as the interim leader of the Payments Infrastructure organization for a few months, which gave me the chance to support a couple hundred additional folks working in an adjacent area of the company, while also continuing to support the Foundation organization I worked with throughout my time there. I learned a dispropor...

Stuff I haven't written yet, but hopefully will someday (2022).

I took some time and cleaned up my writing backlog of “topics to write about” and pulling theminto this post. Let me know if any topics sound particularly helpful, or if I have any particularlygood stories that I’ve forgotten to mention here.

Stories recounting interesting times of my career or life,although inevitably the very best stories are tricky to talk about in public,like these previous stories:

“From ten to 2,000 services: the Uber provisioning.”Lightly touched on in Trunk and Br...

Stripe's model of product-led, developer-centric growth.

Recently, I got an email from someone asking about Stripe’s approachto product-led, developer-centric growth.If you really want a unique insight into Stripe,you’re undoubtedly better off reading Stripe’s 2021 update,but here are my general notes on Stripe as a microcosm of product-led, developer-centric growth.

from Sequoia's The Market Curve

A good place to start this journey is with the market curve, with this one specifically from Sequoia, which segmentscompanies by the customer cohort ...

Mailbag: Resources for Engineering Directors.

Recently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors,as distinct from general engineering management:

I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have writtenI’m mainly looking for advice on how to manage projects from two layers away. How do I give managers creative freedomto manage however they like while also stressing the importance of deadlines?

A few books that initial...

Generating a daily snapshot of Twitter Search results.

Over the past few years I’ve gotten into the unhelpful habit of checkingTwitter search to see if folks have mentioned my writing. I don’t actually doanything with that though, beyond perhaps leaving a “like”.I enjoy using Twitter, but this part of how I use Twitter is just an unhelpfulhabit to waste time, so I wanted to try automating it away.

I got started by creating a new Twitter Developer account,and then wrote up a simple script, github repository, and github action in lethain/social-c...

Should you prioritize infrastructure costs?

This is an exerpt from Infrastructure Engineer’s section on efficiency.

Before diving into the mechanics of managing infrastructure costs, the first question to answer is whether it’s a valuable use of organizational time to make your current infrastructure spend more efficient. How you think about this will vary a bit depending on whether your company is early-stage, prioritizing growth or profitability.

Early-Stage

Generally speaking, very early-stage companies shouldn’t spend much time thinki...