Will Larson's Blog, page 35

Head in the clouds.

When I wrote about the public cloud evolving the role of infrastructure engineering, I sort of imagined that the precursor question–should we run our infrastructure on the public cloud?–was already quite settled. Unexpectedly, it's a discussion that I find myself having more rather than less frequently each year, so I've taken some time to structure and document my thinking.

In short: run on the public cloud unless (1) it prevents you from executing on your core competency or (2)...

Don't follow the sun.

When I speak with engineering leaders, I sometimes get asked to endorse an underway plan to spin up a “follow the sun” on-call rotation. Instead of one team taking pages for the full day, they'll split the load into 2 twelve hour shifts or 3 eight hour shifts.

My advice is not what folks anticipate: please don’t.

"Follow the sun" model is an evolutionary dead end for engineering on-call rotations. Having run the “follow the sun” on-call rotation for several years at Uber, I’ve come to believe...

Notes on Escaping the Build Trap

Last year while thinking about product management in infrastructure I read Cagan's Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love, which I thought was a solid book, roughly summarized as "use rapid experimentation to guide product innovation."

It's apparently the time of year when I read about product management, and having heard quite a bit of praise for Melissa Perri's Escaping the Build Trap, I decided to give it a read and write up book notes.

These are some core quotes from the book, al...

Fostering program engagement.

Some of my favorite pieces to write are those that end up being interesting to a pretty small audience, but tap into a central nerve for that small audience. So far, Programs: tips for owning the unownable, has been in that category. Most folks don't engage much with leading programs, but folks who are have feelings and thoughts.

One particularly good email came in from someone creating a new program, who was curious about advice for a common program challenge:

I joined my current company as...