Will Larson's Blog, page 3

How to get better at strategy?

One of the most memorable quotes in Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesmancomes from Uncle Ben, who describes his path to becoming wealthy as,“When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”I wish I could describe the path to learning engineering strategy in similar terms,but by all accounts it’s a much slower path. Two decades in, I am still learningmore from each project I work on.This book has aimed to accelerate your lear...

Wardley mapping the service orchestration ecosystem (2014).

In Uber’s 2014 service migration strategy,we explore how to navigate the move from a Python monolith to a services-orientedarchitecture while also scaling with user traffic that doubled every six months.

This Wardley map explores how orchestration frameworks were evolvingduring that period, to be used as an input into determining the most effective path forwardfor Uber’s Infrastructure Engineering team.

This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brains...

Making images consistent for book.

TODO: fix TODOs below

After working on diversifying strategies I linked as examplesin #eng-strategy-book,the next problem I wanted to start working on was consistent visualappearances across all images included in the book.There are quite a few images, so I wanted to started by creating a toolto make a static HTML page of all included images, to facilitate reviewingall the images at once.

To write the script, I decided to write a short prompt describing the prompt,followed by paste in the...

Script for consistent linking within book.

As part of my work on #eng-strategy-book, I’ve been editing a bunch of stuff.This morning I wanted to work on two editing problems.First, I wanted to ensure I was referencing strategies evenly across chapters (and not relying too heavily onany given strategy).Second, I wanted to make sure I was making references to other chapters in a consistent, standardized way,

Both of these are collecting Markdown links from files, grouping those links by either file or url,and then outputting the group...

How to resource Engineering-driven projects at Calm? (2020)

One of the recurring challenges in any organization is how to split your attentionacross long-term and short-term problems. Your software might be struggling to scalewith ramping user load while also knowing that you have a series of meaningful security vulnerabilitiesthat need to be closed sooner than later. How do you balance across them?

These sorts of balance questions occur at every level of an organization.A particularly frequent format is the debate between Product and Engineeringabo...

Systems model of API deprecation

In How should Stripe deprecate APIs?, the diagnosisdepends on the claim that deprecating APIs is a significant cause of customer churn.While there is internal data that can be used to correlate deprecation with churn,it’s also valuable to build a model to help us decide if we believe thatcorrelation and causation are aligned in this case.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

What we learn from modeling API deprecation’s impact on user retentionDeveloping a system model using the lethain/systems p...

Is this strategy any good?

We’ve read a lot of strategy at this point in the book.We can judge a strategy’s format, and its construction: both are useful things.However, format is a predictor of quality, not quality itself.The remaining question is, how should we assess whether a strategy is any good?

Uber’s service migration strategy unlockedthe entire organization to make rapid progress.It also led to a sprawling architecture problem down the line.Was it a great strategy or a terrible one? Folks can reasonably dis...

Steps to build an engineering strategy.

Often you’ll see a disorganized collection of ideas labeled as a “strategy.”Even when they’re dense with ideas, these can be hard to parse, and are a majorreason why most engineers will claim their company doesn’t have a clear strategyeven though my experience is that all companies follow some strategy, even if it’s undocumented.

This chapter lays out a repeatable, structured approach to drafting strategy.It introduces each step of that approach, which are then detailed further in their resp...

Operational mechanisms for strategy.

Even the best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve.Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement?No, probably not.

I refer to the art of making policies work as “operations” or “strategy operations.”The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoidingcommon practices that simply don’t work.The other one-third takes some practice, but can be practiced in any engineering role:there’s no need to wa...

Career advice in 2025.

Yesterday, the tj-actions repository, a popular tool used with Github Actions was compromised (for more background read one of these two articles). Watching the infrastructure and security engineering teams at Carta respond, it highlighted to me just how much LLMs can’t meaningfully replace many essential roles of software professionals. However, I’m also reading Jennifer Palkha’s Recoding America, which makes an important point: decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain s...