Sometime ago I was asked where to begin to learn data engineering. It was a broad question, and it took some to understand what exactly I was being asked.
Tag Archives: leadership
Jimmy Carter and the Failures of Management
I’m not old enough to remember Jimmy Carter in office, but I did see him speak once in 2013. With a B.Sc., and some training in nuclear power, his background was always somewhat interesting to me — particularly how someone with a technical education approached politics at the highest levels.
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Moving East
After almost 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am moving to Pittsburgh, PA, to accept a management role with Google. I am very much looking forward to working at a world-class software company.
It was a great two years at Percolate, and I wish all my old colleagues there the very best.
A shared code base does not a software team make
I’ve been programming for many years, and have spent most of the last few years managing development teams. I’ve written plenty of closed source software, and for a time made my living writing open source software too.
One thing stands out: a shared code base does not a software team make.
Continue reading A shared code base does not a software team make
San Francisco ReactJS Meetup at Percolate
Last night Percolate hosted the San Francisco ReactJS Meetup.
I acted as host, and we had great speakers and presentations.
Why Slack isn’t working
Slack: Where work happens
Something is happening at companies that use Slack. Slack, the company, may claim it’s work, but it’s less and less productive work, and it’s having a destructive affect upon my own field of software development.
I like really Slack, Flowdock, Hipchat and their ilk — I’ve written about it before. I couldn’t do my job without them. But it’s time to confront the damage these tools are causing.
Percolate at the San Francisco Python Meetup
The new Analytics system, built by my team at Percolate, allows our end-users to program their own custom calculations, offering them the ability to precisely customize the product for their needs.
At the center of that feature is a Pratt Parser. Percolate recently presented on this topic at the San Francisco Python Meetup. You can find the slides here, and code here.
Analytics 2.0 goes live at Percolate
Today sees the launch of Analytics 2.0 on the Percolate platform. After 12 months of hard work by my team, I am very proud of the new platform.
1 year ago the San Francisco team was tasked with rebuilding the Analytics system at Percolate. In place of our legacy MySQL-based system, we now have a brand new architecture, based on Apache Kafka and Elasticsearch. It’s more responsive, more flexible, and offers much richer functionality.
You can learn all about the new system on the Percolate blog.
What new development managers should know
It’s 2017, and that means I’ve been in various engineering management and technical lead roles for about 6 years. That’s long enough to learn something about management, but short enough to remember clearly all the mistakes I made early on.
Some of my favourite programming books
I was recently asked by some colleagues about my favourite books on programming. And not just books on coding, but on improving their understanding of successful teams.
Elasticsearch Meetup at Percolate
Last night Percolate hosted the San Francisco Elasticsearch Meetup.
I acted as host, and it was a great night, with excellent speakers and presentations.
Ekanite at the San Francisco Go Meetup
I gave a presentation on Ekanite — the syslog server with built-in search — tonight at the San Francisco Go Meetup. It was an enjoyable evening, and I had a chance to discuss why I built Ekanite, how it works, and where it might go in the future.
Be a Conviction Engineer
I’m a conviction engineer.
To me it’s the only way to be an effective engineer, software developer, and technical leader. You’ve simply got to truly believe in the value of what you do, and you’ve got to believe in doing it the right way.
rqlite at the San Francisco Go Meetup
I made a presentation on rqlite tonight at the San Francisco Go Meetup. It was an enjoyable evening, and I had a chance to discuss why I built rqlite, how it works, and where it might go in the future.
Gresham’s law and Slack
“Bad money drives out good.”
When is the last time you spoke with your fellow developer? I mean actually spoke? Or was it just over Slack?
I like really Slack, Flowdock, Hipchat and the like. I couldn’t do my job without them. But as with Gresham’s law, bad communication is driving out good.
Running services is fun
While running services is hard, it’s also fun. It confronts you with a whole set of engineering challenges because you’re building — and running — large scale systems.
So after 18 great months working on the InfluxDB source, I’m returning to Services and have started a new role with Percolate, as Director of Engineering on their Data Platform team.
InfluxDB and the Raft consensus protocol
Leadership without Management
I came across another great video about software engineering management, this time by Bryan Cantrill. It’s a really great talk, and discussed in-depth — with plenty of humour thrown in — the importance of Mission to high-performing software developers.
Running services is hard
I’ve recently been thinking about why running Services is particularly hard. By Services I mean Software-as-a-Service platforms. During the years, I’ve written software for many different systems — embedded software, web services, databases, and distributed systems, but being involved with designing and running a SaaS platform was difficult in a whole new way: running Services is hard work.
Software development: it’s got nothing to do with computers
Well, almost nothing.
Obviously it’s got something to do with computers since developers spend so much of their time in front of one. But software development is actually all about people. And successful software development even more so.
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