Will Larson's Blog, page 5

Uber's service migration strategy circa 2014.

In early 2014, I joined as an engineering manager for Uber’s Infrastructure team.We were responsible for a wide number of things, including provisioning new services.While the overall team I led grew significantly over time,the subset working on service provisioning nevergrew beyond four engineers.

Those four engineers successfully migrated 1,000+ services onto a new, future-proofed service platform.More importantly, they did it while absorbing the majority, although certainly not the entir...

Service onboarding model for Uber (2014).

At the core ofUber’s service migration strategy (2014)is understanding the service onboarding process, and identifying the leversto speed up that process. Here we’ll develop asystem modelrepresenting that onboarding process, and exercise the model to test a numberof hypotheses about how to best speed up provisioning.

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

Where the model of service onboarding suggested we focus on effortsDeveloping a system model using the lethain/systems package on Github.That ...

Refining strategy with Wardley Mapping.

The first time I heard about Wardley Mapping wasfrom Charity Majors discussing it on Twitter.Of the three core strategy refinement techniques,this is the technique that I’ve personally used the least.Despite that, I decided to include it in this book because ithighlights how many different techniques can be used for refining strategy,and also because it’s particularly effective at looking at the broadest ecosystemsyour organization exists in.

Where the other techniques like systems thinki...

How to effectively refine engineering strategy.

In Jim Collins’ Great by Choice,he develops the concept of Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs.His premise is that you should cheaply test new ideas before fully committing to them.Your organization can only afford firing a small number of cannonballs, but it can bankroll far more bullets,so why not use bullets to derisk your cannonballs’ trajectories?

This chapter presents a series of concrete techniques that I have personallyused to effectively refine strategies well before reaching the cannon...

Wardley mapping the LLM ecosystem.

In How should you adopt LLMs?, we explore how a theoretical ride sharing company,Theoretical Ride Sharing, should adopt Large Language Models (LLMs).Part of that strategy’s diagnosis depends on understanding the expected evolution ofthe LLM ecosystem, which we’ve build a Wardley map to better explore.

This map of the LLM space is interested in how product companies should address theproliferation of model providers such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI,as well as the proliferation of LLM pro...

Wardley mapping of Gitlab Strategy.

Gitlab is an integrated developer productivity, infrastructure operations, and security platform.This Wardley map explores the evolution of Gitlab’s users’ needs,as one component in understanding the company’s strategy.In particular, we look at how Gitlab’s strategy of a bundled, all-in-one platformanchors on the belief that build and security tooling is moving from customizationto commodity.

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

2024 in review.

A lot happened for me this year.I continued learning the details of fund accounting at Carta,which is likely the most complex product domain I’ve worked in.My third book was published, and I did a small speaking tour to support it.We started the unironically daunting San Francisco kindergarten application process.I was diagnosed with skin cancer and had successful surgery to remove it.All things considered, it was a much messier year than I intended,but with many good pockets mixed in wit...

Measuring developer experience, benchmarks, and providing a theory of improvement.

Back in 2020, I wrote a piece calledMy skepticism towards current developer meta-productivity tools,which laid out my three core problems with developer productivity measurement tools of the time:

Using productivity measures to evaluate rather than learnInstrumenting metrics required tweaks across too any different toolsGenerally I found tools forced an arbitrary, questionable model onto the problem

Two and a half years later, I made an angel investment in DX,which at the time I largely v...

Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.

In my ongoing efforts to draft a book on engineering strategy,I’ve finally reached the point where I need to transition “Wardley Mapping” from a topic toconsider including into a topic that I either do or do not include.The first step on that line is getting much deeper at understanding how it works.This is rather different than systems modeling,which is a technique I’ve been using off-and-on at work for 15-plus years,but I will make a solid go at it.

My starting point is having readThe V...

Video of practice run of QCon SF 2024 talk on Principal Engineers.

Yesterday at QCon, I got to give a talk with my colleague Dan Fikeabout the Principal Engineer role.You can also watch the video on YouTube.

The content itself is largely based on the High-Context Triadof blog posts I wrote in late 2023:

Layers of contextNavigating ambiguityUseful tradeoffs are multi-dimensional

I hope you enjoy the talk! (Unfortunately I don’t have a recording of Dan Fike’s portion,but QCon will post their official video at some point, which will have both parts.)