Will Larson's Blog, page 29

Poking around Contentful.

Slightly related to my notes on build versus buy decisions, I spent some time specifically getting a feel for Contentful over the weekend, and have written up some notes here.

Why Headless CMSes?

There are a lot of headless CMSes out there, the one I've personally used most is Airtable. You could argue Airtable isn't just a headless CMS, and sure, that's a fine argument to make. As a category, I think headless CMSes do a bunch of things particularly well:

There are many of them, so it's...

Build versus buy.

A few years ago I was working on a contract negotiation with Splunk, and we kept running into what felt like a pretty unreasonable pricing structure. They wanted some number of millions of dollars for a three year license, which felt like a high price to pay for thirty-two ascii characters in a particular sequence. Even with the license, we'd still be the ones operating it and paying for the capacity to run it.

We decided to negotiate by calculating the cost of running our own ELK Stack...

Staying aligned with authority.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

Its a common misconception that authority makes you powerful. Many folks aspiring towards more senior roles assume theyll finally get to do things their way. They believe that the title inherently creates flexibility and autonomy. They believe that the friction holding them back will burst into a whirl of butterflies that scatter into the wind.

The reality is a bit more nuanced.

Titles come with the sort of power called organizational authority, and that...

Getting in the room.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

One of the most common frustrations Ive heard from engineers is that theyre not in the room where important decisions are being made. They dont understand the company decisions, and have important context that seems to be missing or ignored. Staff-plus engineers frequently cite access to the room as a major benefit of their level, and titles do increase the likelihood that youll be involved in decisions that impact you.

However, its important to remember...

Learn to never be wrong.

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com

Most folks have worked with someone who thinks theyre never wrong. In each discussion, they lean in, broaden their shoulders and breach their way into the role of the decider. Theyll continue debating until their perspective wins the day or time runs out. They are often right, but right in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the room. As their tenure at a company increases, they may fancy that theyve become very persuasive, but frequently its a form of...

How do folks reach Staff Engineer?

At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior Software Engineer, the so-called career level, in five to eight years. At that point your path branches, and you have the opportunity to pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer.

Over the past few years we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the engineering manager career path, like Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager and my own An Elegant...

Hotspotting developer productivity.

Late last year I had coffee with Keith Adams, and we ended up chatting a bunch about migrations in the context of making it easier to extend an unruly codebase. The discussion went in a bunch of directions, including chatting a bit about Building Evolutionary Architecture. One idea that Keith mentioned in that discussion has particularly stuck with me: most changes happen in the same handful of files, and those files are the most effective place to invest into quality improvement.

I believe...

vtt-compactor: slightly less verbose VTT files.

I'm working on a small project that involves interviewing a number of folks to capture their experience becoming and working as a Staff engineer. Hopefully the first stories will be ready to post in a couple of weeks, but what I've been surprised by is just how tricky it can be to get good interview notes.

So far Zoom's record meeting has been phenomenal because it produces a text transcript in the VTT format that's extremely "good enough" to edit into an interview. However, the format is a...

Resources for Staff-plus engineers.

When I was working on Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering, one of the most valuable things I did was build a list of resources for folks (especially me) to continue their learning and exploration.

Recently, I’ve been focused on the question of “What does it mean to be a Staff or Staff-plus engineer, and how do you get there?”, and have gathered this collection of resources for folks who are looking to grow as or into such roles.

Your Network

Almost unanimously Staff-plus engineers’...

From one to two: how to start a successful distributed engineering office.

Recently it feels like companies are moving beyond the single office model earlier and earlier in the lifetime. Maybe it’s improvements in video conferencing, perhaps it’s the increasing costs of operating in Silicon Valley, perhaps it’s just a fad, but in any case, effectively supporting additional company offices is an important and increasingly core skill for engineering leaders.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with several distributed offices, founding SocialCode’s San Francisco office...