Will Larson's Blog, page 7

Executive

Management

Posts

Tags

Physics and perception.

At one point in 2019, several parts of Stripe’s engineering organization were going through a polite civil war.The conflict was driven by one group’s belief that Java should replace Ruby.Java would, they posited, address the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality platform in the face of both a rapidly growing business and a rapidly growing engineering organization. The other group believed Stripe’s problems were driven by a product domain with high essential complexity and numerous, demandi...

Architecture

Staff-Plus

How to create software quality.

I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, and particularly enjoyed this quote from a memo discussed in the Zero Defects chapter:

You can improve the quality of your code, and if you do, the rewardsfor yourself and for Microsoft will be immense.The hardest part is to decide that you want to write perfect code.

If I wrote that in an internal memo, I imagine the engineering team would mutiny, butsoftware quality is certainly an interesting topic where I continue to refine my think...

Video of Using LLMs in your product.

A month ago, I wrote up some notes onusing LLMs in your product,and yesterday I got to present an iteration on those notes tothe folks at the Sapphire Venture’s 2024 Hypergrowth Engineering Summit.

If you’re interested, you can watch a recording of my talk on Youtube.There’s a lot of overlap with the notes, but I also go into Carta’s approach thus-far to incorporating LLMs into our product.(Note that it’s a recording of a practice run I did earlier in the week, not a recording from the ven...

No Wrong Doors.

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.

For the most part, technology organizations are not complex bureaucracies, but sometimes the...