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Because coordination is expensive
If you’ve ever worked at a larger organization, stop me if you’ve heard (or asked!) any of these questions: “Why do we move so slowly as an organization? We need to figure out how to move more...
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Amdahl, Gustafson, coding agents, and you
In the software operations world, if your service is successful, then eventually the load on it is going to increase to the point where you’ll need to give that services more resources. There are two...
View ArticleMy favorite developer productivity research method that nobody uses
You’ve undoubtedly heard of the psychological concept called flow state. This is the feeling you get when you’re in the zone, where you’re doing some sort of task, and you’re just really into it, and...
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Tradeoff costs in communication
If you work in software, and I say the word server to you, which do you think I mean? Software that responds to requests (e.g., http server) A physical piece of hardware (e.g., a box that sits in a...
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The carefulness knob
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are...
View ArticleSafety first!
I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan “safety first”. It is a statement of values for an organization, but let’s think about how to define what it should mean explicitly. Here’s how I propose to define...
View ArticleWhen there’s no gemba to go to
I’m finally trying to read through some Toyota-related books to get a better understanding of the lean movement. Not too long ago, I read Sheigo Shingo’s Non-Stock Production: The Shingo System of...
View ArticleMaking peace with the imperfect nature of mental models
We all carry with us in our heads models about how the world works, which we colloquially refer to as mental models. These models are always incomplete, often stale, and sometimes they’re just plain...
View ArticleIncident categories I’d like to see
If you’re categorizing your incidents by cause, here are some options for causes that I’d love to see used. These are all taken directly from the field of cognitive systems engineering research....
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Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I...
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Bad Religion: A review of Work Pray Code
When I worked as a professor at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, after being there for a few months, during a conversation with the chair of the computer science department he asked me “have you...
View ArticleSoftware engineering in-the-large: the coordination challenge
Back when I was an engineering student, I wanted to know “How do the big companies develop software? How does it happen in the real world?” Now that I work at a company that has to do large-scale...
View ArticleThe ambiguity of real work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professor Donald...
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