Will Larson's Blog, page 18

STAR method for interview questions.

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A few weeks ago my learning circle started working through each others’ career checkups. Following that, a few folks started talking about framing their experience effectively in interviews. Around the same time, Thiago Ghisi shared a few nice tweets about using the STAR format to answer interview questions. Pulling those all together, it felt like a good time to pull together a quick template to practice using the STAR format to share experiences. I also write up a few examp...

Career checkup template.

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At Uma Chingunde’s suggestion,the learning circle I’m part of is doing a short detouron career trajectory, and I’ve written up a short templateto use. This is similar to a career narrative, but with more focus on self-diagnosis thansomething presentable to others.

I’ve been experimenting with reusable templates over on Infrastructure Engineering,and decided to try something similar here. (That experiment is itself inspiredby Brie Wolfson’s use of templates in The Kool-A...

Plagarism, idea theft, and writing online.

I’ve been in a handful of discussions over the past few weeks about plagiarization: how should authors approach their work being directly or indirectly copied?

When I started writing online in 2007, I was writing to learn to write, and my early stuff showed that, by which I mean it wasn’t very good. I mostly documented stuff I was learning in Django like creating a middleware for Google Analytics (please don’t follow any advice in that article: it’s 15 years out of date) or setting up Django and...

Mailbag: Did I become a manager too soon?

I recently got an email about moving into an engineering managementrole too early in the email writer’s career:

I became an engineering manager two years ago, which was also two years into my career.The reason is mainly that we were a small team and when the time came to add line management I was around and down for it.I have loved this position, and find it extremely fulfilling to be able to remain technical and still have a deeply human job and build strong relationships with my team and a...

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...