Technology Commentary

By decoupling databases and improving resiliency, microfrontends give websites and applications the same benefits as microservices provide backends.

As we get ready for the launch of the first lapel pin mobile phone, let’s consider lapel pins for a second. Are they usually vessels for innovation?

One piece of flippant commentary that you’ll hear occasionally is that it’s “Better to be lucky than to be good.” On an individual level, it’s almost certainly true that being very lucky outperforms being quite good: I certainly know a number of folks who are financially successful after working at companies that succeeded, but where their direct impact was relatively small. Companies get lucky, too. This is true both in the sense that the door to acquisitions was much more attractive last decade than it is today, and also in the sense of Ben Horowitz’s quote from The Hard Thing About Hard Things, “Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.

Many of the most important questions for running an organization don’t have clear answers. In most engineering organizations, both the teams working on infrastructure and the teams working on product feel they are undersized. It’s also true that most individuals feel they are undercompensated. In the boom times, there is often enough investor money laying around to say yes to all these questions, but many leaders are acutely learning the long-term costs of expanding our budget too far.

According to Gartner, the full lifecycle API management quadrant is going away, but acknowledges in 2023 the API gateway continues to enjoy an outsized amount of focus when it comes to internal and public API operations. The gateway is important, and tends to be where attention is focused in good times and bad, but other stops along the API life cycle are also critical to the conversation as well, and I’m looking to understand more about why, while trying to understand where things might be going.

I have less than 16 milliseconds to do more than thousands of operations.

I meant to post this when I left Calm earlier this year, as a ending note to my post on joining Calm, but instead I got focused on joining Carta and writing An Engineering Executive’s Primer. I’m cleaning out some of my old drafts, and posting this as an artifact of that moment. Although I ended up starting a role sooner than expected–it was the right opportunity to accept–I did get to spend more time with my kid, finish my next book, and get my running distance back up, so I’ll call it a successful sabbatical even if it was a compacted one.

I’m cleaning out old lingering drafts. This one’s on why I dislike Team Charters. Recently an email came in asking about writing team charters. I’ve worked at a number of companies that asked teams to write charters, and I think it’s an interesting project. That said, it’s not a project I’d generally prioritize. If you pushed me on this topic, I’d probably suggest you write an engineering strategy document from the perspective of your team.

Beyond preserving their careers by adapting to the new technology, developers could help guide the arrival of tools alleviating their own pain points. They could preserve that fundamental satisfaction of helping others, while tackling increasingly more complex problems.

When interacting with generative-AI bots, users engage in six types of conversations, depending on their skill levels and their information needs. Interfaces for UI bots should support and accommodate this diversity of conversation styles.

Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world. I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for y…

How GPTs will become the predominant way you interact with computers.

How running 200 million Lambdas in a year unveiled the agility and ease of serverless, but also revealed their pitfalls — scaling’s promise meets nuanced reality.

Posted on Friday 10 Nov 2023. 1,420 words, 18 links. By Matt Webb.

Applying Markov chains to a Taskmasker task.

As a leader, you want to effect change. But too much change can be detrimental and a sign of an unhealthy team. Here’s how to find the right balance.

Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are. This often happens without our...

Kubernetes core maintainers should weigh the benefits of proposed new features against the additional complexity they would bring, the Kubernetes co-founder advised at this year's KubeCon.

The creator of the first ever banner ad on why it worked so well, and why its modern incarnations miss the mark

Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we covered how early paywalls for content almost universally failed. We’ll explore a bit more of the why later, but first we ne…

Manual integration testing for microservices is like trying to make cats march in a parade. There’s a better way.