Posts on Jens Rantil

These past years, I have had a lot of people reaching out and wanting to talk “AI” (or LLMs) with me.

I was once assigned as the onboarding buddy for my then-new colleague Jeff.

Code freezes commonly stirs up strong emotions within the engineering community.

The term AI is everywhere these days.

I recently read the blog post “In Praise of –dry-run”.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

An incident framework usually has the concept of an incident priority: priority 1 (“Systems are DOWN!”)

Incident process?

Kagi Translate supports translating from English to LinkedIn Speak.

I have never been a big fan of how some people equate “contract testing” with using something like PACT.

Charade.

I recently stumbled across the post “Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?”

This post will be the first in a series of blog posts where I will be talking about the limitations of Apache Kafka as a task queue and how we overcame these limitations at a previous employer where I managed tens of fairly high-throughput Apache Kafka cl…

I have used the same one-on-one template with my last six managers, including other regular check-ins.

Amazon’s founder Jeff Besos is famous for his “disagree and commit” management principle used in leadership.

Many people believe pair programming has to be a session where coding is the only action.

Throughout my career I have heard soooo many people complain about the general concept of process - the standardized series of steps needed to perform a task.

In safety systems engineering (SSE) people talk about “safety type 1” and “safety type 2”.

I recently read the article “Why I don’t like discussing action items during incident reviews” by Lorin Hochstein.

Earlier this year, I was on a complex multi-team project that was handed to us by our product organization.

In software engineering jargon, people often speak of “performance” without defining specifically what they mean.

In the article “Natural solutions”, I wrote […] product engineering is equally much about defining the problems we are trying to solve. and I think that statement is somewhat more controversial than first meets the eye.

I recently wrote about the solution vs. problem space.

Today I wanted to write something about the recent CrowdStrike Falcon incident and about one contributing factor, namely centralised risk management.

In the article Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally by Andrew Harmel-Law he talks about the concept of Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) as a way to align and document architectural decisions.

As engineers, we are great at solving problems and working in the “solution space”.

There is a belief that “software architecture” only involves designing the “big picture” of how software is built.

Innovation is the skill of going from idea to action.

This is a follow-up on How to Ask Good Questions.

Info This article is about staging environments, but it almost equally applies to the concept of single-tenant environments.

I think our software industry sometimes is blindsided when it comes to security.

The Agile Manifesto states Responding to change over following a plan This implies that we must design our systems to be malleable to change and allow for evolutionary design.

Background Story Link to heading Imagine you’re mentoring an engineer who’s eager to brush up on their coding skills after a hiatus from programming.

I was on my first podcast discussing the topic of “SRE & Full Ownership”!

Info This post is part of my blog series about My Simplicity Toolkit.

I recently read the excellent article Data is not a Strategy.

I have been very close to burnout two times in my career.

I recently read the article “What I learned getting acquired by Google” by Shreyans Bhansali.

Info This is the second part of two talking about my simplicity toolkit when programming.

Info This post is part of my blog series about My Simplicity Toolkit.

Info Blog series: My simplicity toolkit: Intro (this page) My simplicity toolkit: Programming (part 1) My simplicity toolkit: Programming (part 2) My simplicity toolkit: Testing My simplicity toolkit: Architecture My simplicity toolkit: Patterns “Perfecti…

Back in the day when The Cloud (AWS) was The New Hot Thing™️, I thought autoscaling would solve most of our problems related to costs, availability, performance, and scalability.

Enterprise hostage situation: First @disqus roles out ads on all free tiers.

As engineers, we all occasionally need to reach out and ask for help.

Shower thought: Why do we talk about MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution), when it’s a latency?

Over the years, I have heard many people say something like Over 50% of people think they are better than the average car driver.

I tend to love a “quick feedback”.

Today I would like to talk about a missed opportunity when giving and receiving feedback – mainly the discussion that happens afterwards.

Throughout my career I’ve been drilled to “have a customer-first mindset”.

Today I would like to talk about caching strategies for aggregate queries over time-based data which is updated often.