Board

How to take ideas from books and blog posts and turn them into effective personal experiments.

The Chinese Businessmen Paradox: what is it that makes uneducated, superstitious Chinese businessmen successful?

David Maister's Managing the Professional Service Firm reveals some very fundamental principles about the business of consulting.

Career moats are inspired by Warren Buffett's conception of a business's 'economic moat'. Here we take a look at a particular type of economic moat, to see what we can take from it when applied to an individual career.

A reading technique that's ridiculously simple, and surprisingly effective when used in service of reading for career goals.

Education robs us of the ability to do trial and error. And yet trial and error is how a generation of traditional Chinese businessmen learnt their craft.

If rationality is so important to success in business and in life, how is it possible for an entire generation of superstitious Chinese businessmen to succeed?

Small businesses don't grow large by accident. But most hit an invisible ceiling on the way up. Does strategy matter for breaking past this ceiling?

Cloud computing, DevOps and agile development, data infrastructure, AI/ML, enterprise apps and collaboration tools, and security.

The introduction to this series can be found here. Summary: There are many ways to put a human life together, including for sex and love. Each path has tradeoffs. __________________________________…

A look at how endpoint protection providers are morphing into XDR.

Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team. Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams with names like Storage, Traffic, and Compute.

This is my personal story of starting the SRE organization at Uber. If you want advice rather than reminiscence, take a look at Trunk and Branches Model and Productivity in the age of hypergrowth. After I left SocialCode in 2014, I spent a month interviewing at a handful of companies trying to figure out what to do next. I was torn between two different paths: (1) leading engineering at a very small startup, or (2) taking a much smaller role at a fast growing company, with the expectation that growth would create opportunity.

There are few things more exciting than being at a company during hypergrowth, but it’s easy to let hypergrowth get away from you, and to end up reacting instead of planning. It’s hard to steer when you’re rebuilding a plane mid-flight, but you can always nudge it in the right direction.

The advertising has shifted from a Google-Facebook duopoly to one where Amazon and potentially Apple are major forces.

What does it mean when we say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out? Why is it important? And how else could we look at this problem?

A look at what Zscaler provides in Zero Trust and SASE, and what it is focused on next.

Feisty indies that do too well don't stay indie for long

SWIFT operates a messaging protocol which ties banks together with correspondent banks. This collaboration enables most international wires.

Summary: The displacement of in-person developer events has vaulted Developer Advocacy forward by...

The next decade in SaaS won't look like the last

I’ve written in the past that I think returns for SaaS won’t be as attractive over the next decade. This view is focused on enterprise software. I am more bullish on SMB SaaS, primarily on vertical-specific players which I will discuss below. Vertical Aggregation

And a quick and dirty look at SPLK, NTNX, and GWRE

A look at what Gartner thinks is coming in cloud, network, and app security over the next few years.

It's the Read Max Career Corner

The client is an Indian self-drive car rental company headquartered in Bangalore, India. Zoomcar holds the distinction of being India's first personal mobility platform, with the introduction of car-sharing services in 2013. With a strong focus on the mobile experience, Zoomcar allows users to rent cars by the hour, day, week, or month. In 2018, Zoomcar introduced India's first peer2peer based marketplace for cars with the launch of its shared subscription mobility model. Continue Reading...

We're exploring an approach to simplifying app development: storing all application and UI state in a client-side reactive relational database that provides a structured dataflow model.

Learn how to make your API stand out from the rest with these tried and tested tips.

One more point on Peloton’s poor operations, then more news from the chip industry: Intel makes an acquisition and ARM is on its own.