- Amazon’s Away Teams laid bare: How AWS’s hivemind of engineers develop and maintain their internal tech • The Register
Great stuff in here for larger software companies… short cycle times, A/B testing, autonomous decision making, away teams, access to source code, service ownership, etc..
(categories: amazon aws microservices distributed-architecture software devops management data ) - Googler Steve Yegge Apologizes for Platform Rant, Shares Bezos War Story — LAUNCH
Quote: "You have to understand: most people were scared around Bezos because they were waaaay too worried about trying to keep their jobs. People in high-level positions sometimes have a little too much personal self-esteem invested in their success. Can you imagine how annoying it must be for him to be around timid people all day long? But me — well, I thought I was going to get fired every single day. So fuck timid. Might as well aim high and go out in a ball of flame." I don’t relate to that at all.
(categories: management bold accountable ball-of-flame culture power ) - Things We Don’t Do
JFDI
(categories: cloud aws operations velocity ) - An Orbit Map of the Solar System
So good.
(categories: space maps visualization ) - Cloud Optimization Circus – Subbu’s Blog
Lots of great stuff in this post, quote: "Acknowledging that cloud spend is a variable that you can manage, that you must maintain the spend at a certain efficiency, and removing the stigma from cost optimization are essential to building a culture of cloud cost awareness."
(categories: aws cost spend management cost-optimization cloud )
Links: 5-13-2019
- Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people — mcdreeamie-musings
Quote: "…. An audience reading text off the screen does not count as learning. Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened."
(categories: communication nasa powerpoint slides writing presentation )
Links: 4-27-2019
- The Behavioral Change Stairway Model – VIACONFLICT
I need to work this angle with the kids in my life, although active listening and empathy is probably an amazing practice for any and all situations in life.
(categories: collaboration conflict relationships negotiation influence listening empathy )
Links: 4-16-2019
- Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System (SAROPS)
Software is everywhere.
(categories: software ops sar ) - Experiments, growth engineering, and the perils of not disguising your API routes: Part 1 – JonLuca’s Blog
Great deep dive into feature flags, API’s and security.
(categories: abtesting api security testing experiments )
Links: 4-12-2019
- Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions
I’m guilty of weasel words on a regular basis, need to clean that up. Love the ideas about writing documents vs. presenting PowerPoint.
(categories: writing amazon business management )
Links: 4-11-2019
- Making sense of a crazy year in open source | Scale Venture Partners
Without comment.
(categories: opensource pivotal chef hashicorp redis kafka elastic ) - The six signs of go-to-market repeatability | Scale Venture Partners
Loved these questions: Are you creating a new market? If not, are you replacing or adding to an existing market? Are you selling into large enterprises, mid-market companies, SMBs, or all of the above? Are you targeting a specific industry, sector, or sub-sector? Or is your solution broadly horizontal (valuable to many industries)? Do you have a sense of the size of the market you are attacking? Do you understand your target’s existing technology stack (if any) and where your product fits in? D…
(categories: product-market-fit gtm sales fit ) - How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon’s Competitive Advantage – CEO Writing – The Blog of Slab
Communication via long form writing is a theme I’ve come across more and more recently.
(categories: writing communication motivation management leadership amazon meetings ) - The Cloud and Open Source Powder Keg – tecosystems
(categories: elasticsearch oss opensource cloud business aws amazon )
- What Working At Stripe Has Been Like | Kalzumeus Software
This entire blog post is worth reading multiple times.. and continuing my theme on writing: "… I think I once had the typical engineer’s disdain for Strategy Memos (TM), but if you think of it as less a Strategy Memo (TM) and more a pull request for a very complicated program which directs the activities of dozens or hundreds of people, it gets a lot easier to stomach."
(categories: stripe culture career business writing communication )
Links: 3-28-2019
- Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures
Quote: "Sci-Fi has always inspired inventors and entrepreneurs. So instead of waiting for the future, the world’s biggest corporations are employing Sci-Fi writers to conjure it for them." Not unlike the JPL article back in 2015.
(categories: design fiction story science strategy futurism )
Links: 3-16-2019
- The Learning Community AMA: James Clear
Great stuff to think about wrt friction and mindset around habits.
(categories: habits purpose friction decision-making ) - Childhood’s End | Edge.org
Quote: "The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enou…
(categories: ai computing culture ) - OpenView Product Led Growth Playbook
Summary: "1. The product market conditions are right for the strategy. 2. The value of the product is perceived by the user as being a unique “highest-value-product” that they want to use regularly. 3. The user realizes significant ongoing value quickly and easily with little-to-no help from company personnel. 4. The product “paywalls” follow, rather than lead, the actual value that the user receives and pricing scales as usage increases and more value is delivered. 5. The product has feature…
(categories: strategy growth product-management ) - Wardley Maps Explained & Canvassed on a Virtual Whiteboard
Love the five factors for strategy and the need to try the map some time. Quote: "To Simon Wardley, the technique’s inventor, strategy can be described using Sun Tzu’s Five Factors: purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine and leadership. In that model, a wise leader has a moral imperative (a what and a why), grasps the terrain (has a map), anticipates the patterns of the forces acting on the environment, trains the organization in universally useful principles and makes shrewd decisions that lead …
(categories: strategy analysis wardleymaps methods planning ) - GitHub – snowplow/snowplow: Cloud-native web, mobile and event analytics, running on AWS and GCP
Quote: "Snowplow is an enterprise-strength marketing and product analytics platform. It does three things: Identifies your users, and tracks the way they engage with your website or application Stores your users’ behavioural data in a scalable "event data warehouse" you control: in Amazon S3 and (optionally) Amazon Redshift or Postgres Lets you leverage the biggest range of tools to analyze that data, including big data tools (e.g. Spark) via EMR or more traditional tools e.g. Looker, Mode, Sup…
(categories: analytics metrics opensource aws ) - Re:Think Decision Making 2019 Annie Duke
So much amazing stuff in here…the takedown of the Pats / Seahawks interception is brilliant… also touches on resulting, chess vs. poker as it relates to strategy and information asymmetries, decision making, disconfirmation bias, outside view vs. inside view (loved that), asking "how sure are you?", betting, risk profiles, etc..
(categories: risk decision-making strategy poker football )
Links: 3-14-2019
- The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
Such a great adventure story.
(categories: deathvalley desert history mystery nonfiction search sar ) - my biggest writing mistake
Quote: " The Like button specifically heightens anxiety and decreases feelings of self-worth. We use these platforms because we seek validation and human acknowledgement and interaction, but never get it. So we come back (at least every 12 minutes). Looking for self-worth on these platforms is a false dichotomy—how can we increase “self” from external factors? How we can place any part of worth in the number of clicks we get on a heart after our updates?"
(categories: life culture facebook friends )
Links: 3-7-2019
- The Radical Calm of Alex Honnold – Men’s Journal
Quote: "But Alex seems to treat his emotions like a car stereo. When the music gets too loud, he just turns down the dial and keeps driving."
(categories: emotional-intelligence calm control emotions )