All posts by ajohnson

Links: 11-6-2018

  • Apple’s Tim Cook: The Genius Behind Steve Jobs (Fortune, 2008) | Fortune
    Quote: "One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?” Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, …
    (categories: business leadership focus )

Links: 9-16-2018

Links: 9-15-2018

  • What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. | TechCrunch
    Quote: "Focus on the road not the wall—When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. "
    (categories: leadership management focus thinking )

  • Every single emotion
    Quote: "If you bite on everything they throw at you, they will grind you down. You have to ignore a certain amount of stuff. The thing I keep saying to them lately is: “I have to love you, and I have the right to ignore you.” When my kids ask what I want for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, I use the same answer my father did: “Peace and quiet.”"
    (categories: children life parenthood )

Links: 9-3-2018

Links: 9-1-2018

  • Favorite Sayings
    Quote: "The three most powerful words for building credibility are "I don’t know" Many people worry that not knowing something is a sign of weakness, and that if a leader seems not to have all the answers they will lose the confidence of their team. Such people try to pretend they have the answer in every situation, making things up if necessary and never admitting mistakes."
    (categories: knowledge attitude programming quotes )

  • Peter Bourgon · Observability signals
    Quote: "The write path could accept raw events, de-mux them into metrics, traces, and logs heuristically or by the “shape” of the data, make the relevant optimizations, and store them into purpose-driven backends. The read path could provide a single pane-of-glass-style interface abstracting over those backends."
    (categories: observability monitoring tracing logs metrics )

  • JEP 328: Flight Recorder
    Quote: "Flight Recorder records events originating from applications, the JVM and the OS. Events are stored in a single file that can be attached to bug reports and examined by support engineers, allowing after-the-fact analysis of issues in the period leading up to a problem. Tools can use an API to extract information from recording files."
    (categories: jvm java performance troubleshooting )

  • JEP 331: Low-Overhead Heap Profiling
    Quote: "There is a deep need for users to understand the contents of their heaps. Poor heap management can lead to problems such as heap exhaustion and GC thrashing. As a result, a number of tools have been developed to allow users to introspect into their heaps, such as the Java Flight Recorder, jmap, YourKit, and VisualVM tools. One piece of information that is lacking from most of the existing tooling is the call site for particular allocations. Heap dumps and heap histograms do not contain …
    (categories: jvm java heap memory troubleshooting )

  • Exclusive: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on Apple, Facebook, Netflix–and the f
    Lots of good stuff in this article about leadership, scaling teams, tours of duty and focus, both individually and for the company. Quote: "I also write out what my daily, weekly, monthly goals are, and every evening I check how I’m doing. And then I just over allocate my time [to match the goals]. People think that creativity is this free spirit that has no boundaries. No, actually the most creative people in the world schedule their creativity. That’s the irony. So I try to do the same. I jus…
    (categories: spotify leadership business technology missions management )

Links: 8-29-2018

  • I Can’t — Rob Jones Journey
    Quote: "Therefore, the real question that we should be asking in response is, “have you tried EVERYTHING?” Have you exhausted every possible option, scenario, combination, tool, and approach? I do not simply refer to the ones that you knew of at the time you decided to undertake your task. I mean, have you also researched possibilities that you hadn’t known about? Have you determined whether or not there is another person out there that has performed the exact same task you are attempting, o…
    (categories: psychology motivation thinking )