all things engineering

This blog post is adapted from a lightning talk I gave at the Boston Golang meetup in December of 2015. For a while, it seemed like everyone was crazy for microservices. You couldn’t open up your favorite news aggregator of choice without some company you had never heard of touting how the move t

We applied six times trying to get into Y Combinator.

And other lessons learned from creating a popular open-source project (JSON5)

To make sense of all the contradictory info on Google & Facebook hiring freezes, we surveyed hundreds of engineers who are interviewing there right now.

What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout prevention possible? All the research, in one free, constantly updated book.

The Heroku HTTP API Design Guide, forked to look more like its original pre-GitBook state with a more easily digestible single-page format. - GitHub - brandur/heroku-http-api-design: The Heroku HTT...

In this post we'll cover one of the topics we get asked about the most: guaranteeing webhook ordering.

The Facebook Field Guide to Machine Learning is a six-part video series developed by the Facebook ads machine learning team....

Let’s make 2021... fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques.

Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently UPDATE: We’ve written an entire book on this topic! Read it online: Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters. Agile star…

Some of my favorite practices and ideas from almost four years at Heroku.

When it comes to cache invalidation, we believe we now have an effective solution to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij shares 12 steps that managers can take to help employees avoid burnout.

A blog about (mostly) computery things

Training a collaborative filtering based recommendation system on a toy dataset is a sophomore year project in colleges these days. But where the rubber meets the road is building such a system at scale, deploying in production, and serving live requests within a few hundred milliseconds while the user is waiting for the page to load. To build a system like this, engineers have to make decisions spanning multiple moving layers like:

It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.

Braintree Payments uses PostgreSQL as its primary datastore. We rely heavily on the data safety and consistency guarantees a traditional…

Throughout my career, the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others.   I’ve experienced this mistake as both an IC and a manager. A…

Important, Read This First You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context. “You just need to charge more!” says the company […]

Several years ago I actually cared about the differences between AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Namely, that Terraform did not provide…

31 reflections from 10,000 hours of deliberate programming practice.