Will Larson's Blog, page 22

An interlude.

A few months ago around nine on a Wednesday evening, my vision blurred, and I lost my sense of balance. It seemed like a fine time to go to bed. When I attempted to explain my predicament to my wife, it turned out I’d also lost my ability to communicate verbally. I was having a stroke. My wife–wiser than I and besieged by the mismatched words that I believed constituted communication–collected our infant son, coaxed me into the car, and we were at the nearby hospital a few minutes later.

With Co...

Mailbag: Should we just call them architects?

A couple of days ago, I got another question about Staff Engineer,which felt worth digging into a bit:

I started reading your new book Staff Engineer and wondering if you can write about your thoughts on the difference between what we know as Technical Architect vs Staff Engineer. It looks like the big companies ditched the “Architect” title and invented the “Staff Engineer.” The more I read your book, the more I feel like Staff Engineers are plain old tech architects. Having set up an archite...

RSS feed changing! Migrating blog in next few days.

tl;dr - subscribe to RSS via /feeds.xml instead of /feeds/

The current version of this blog has been running for about four years,since I wrote Notes from fifth blog rewrite.It’s been running as a Golang service that loaded posts and files from S3,which has worked out surprisingly well for most purposes.However, there are a few things that have taken a bit of effort to keep working.In particular have spent a few hours each year on the GCP Kubernetes cluster, the Docker builds, and LetsEncry...

Mailbag: How to deal with unhappy users on your Internal platform?

I'm in the early stages of working with my friend, Rachael Stedman,on an "Ask an engineering leadership" project where we try to answer folks challenging engineering leadership questions.This is one of the questions that came in that wasn't a perfect fit for that project(we're still callibrating a bit on what is a perfect fit), but still a question I wanted to take a stab at answering.

I work as an Engineering Manager at a large organization, supporting team managers across four teams who wo...

Measures of engineering impact.

My engineering leadership circle met yesterday, and like usual, we talked about our current challenges before segueing into a deeper discussion. This time, Jack Danger brought up the challenge of measuring engineering impact, which is a fascinating topic that most engineering leaders have to tackle.

Measures of engineering impact are not Accelerate’s measures of developer productivity: lead time, batch size, failure rate, and time to revert. Those measures support understanding and optimizing y...

Digital gardening at Exuberant Sketches.

Last year I read Weinberg on Writing, and I’ve been thinking about its ideas a lot since. It focuses on the concept of “The Fieldstone Method” of writing, which I’d summarize as (1) writing things that energize you and (2) approaching writing organically rather than linearly. Lose the excitement for your current project? Work on something else for a while. Find a fantastic idea that doesn’t fit into this article? Add it to a pile of related concepts to come back to later.

Some of Weinberg’s spe...

Self-publishing Staff Engineer.

After I published An Elegant Puzzle, I consolidated my notes into What I learned writing a book. That was my first book writing and publishing experience, and I learned a great deal. When I started working on Staff Engineer, I sort of knew what I wanted to do, but because I ended up self-publishing, I ended up learning at least as much as with my first book.

There are a bunch of great articles on writing technical books out there like The Economics of Writing a Technical Book, Writing a book: i...

Mailbag: Building alignment around a new strategy.

Another question regarding Staff Engineer that came in recently:

There was a bit in your book where you mentioned after you finished writing your vision - that you shared it out because you were very excited (and then trying not to be let down by not hearing much back in terms of response). Was curious if you could share more about how you think about sharing larger technical visions or strategies. Do you start with smaller circles? Do you send out to everyone at once? Do you introduce it at an...

Mailbag: How to encourage good documents rather than perfect documents?

A great question on Staff Engineer that I received recently:

When you’re writing docs (and reviewing them) I really resonated with the idea of pushing for them to be good and not perfect. Was curious how you go about fostering that culture beyond yourself? I feel like since we’ve shifted to a remote culture, doc grooming has reached an all time high. Also curious if that’s something you’ve felt at all?

There’s an increasingly pervasive belief that written communication is the “obviously best” ...

The curious case of the missing regretted attrition.

Over the past year, most of my writing time went into Staff Engineer, and I’ve accumulated a long backlog of topics that I didn’t find time to write about. Staring down that list of topics, I looked for something that inspired some energy and would be quick to write. My list of topics to write about is mostly just titles, occasionally with a supporting sentence to decode my forgotten intentions.

The first topic on that list that jumped out at me was recorded simply as, “The curious case of the ...