Justin Garrison's Homepage

Comments Moment of impact If you watch the gif again look at the moment the ball hits the glass.

Comments Skill Some developers are very skilled.

Comments Picking yourself up Learning new things is hard.

Comments Hard work, unnoticed We’ve all worked hard on something only to have it go completely unnoticed or the work completely cancelled.

Comments Continuous frustration Continuous integration and deployment systems have gone through a lot of changes.

Comments Motivation It is easier to educate a do-er than to motivate the educated My experience at companies in various jobs and in open source communities echos this quote.

Comments BGP I heard the GIF came from what happened when Facebook ran the following command. ip link set fb0 down Thankfully they were able to fix it with sudo reboot Thinking If you’re overthinking you should write.

Comments Laying a trap for yourself I have lost track of how many times I’ve patched a bug only to have it come back and hit me in the head.

Comments I twice had lunch with Ed Catmull at Disney and I asked him if there was anything that surprised him about managing people.

Comments Edutainment I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

Comments Shipping products This past week I was part of the team that launched EKS Anywhere.

Comments Tools you’re familiar with The right tool for the job isn’t always the best tool.

Comments Stress As a junior developer you get assigned work and have to implement it and solve problems within a certain scope.

Comments Puzzling Growing up my dad loved puzzles.

Comments Stealing The Corner Office I listened to this book and here are the action items to help you climb the career ladder into senior leadership if that’s what you want.

Comments Your build tools are great, but no one wants to learn them I’ve never worked somewhere that had a completely off-the-shelf CI/CD system.

Comments Cher Ami Cher Ami was a messenger pigeon used by the American army in France during WWI.

Comments Resiliency Code and systems break all the time.

Comments An industry secret For all the automation the technology industry prides itself in there’s still a lot of it that’s manual.

Comments Code generators Lots of people recommend learning to program by starting with fundamentals.

Comments Silent stories The ability to educate with stories is something humans are very good at.

Comments Simplicity vs User Experience Why do fans have that weird nob to turn on oscillation but they have buttons for speed control?

Comments Who’s to blame?

Comments Declarative and imperative Oftentimes in technology we say declarative things are better than imperative.

Comments Nostalgia technology Looking back at old technology products most of the time I think how bad they were.

Comments Curiosity Sometimes our curiosity gets the best of us.

Comments End results When I think about how I create software it feels very haphazard.

Comments Self made complexity Everyone is familiar with their own complexity.

Comments Wings (1927) The gif is from a silent film I’ve never seen but it won the first ever Academy Award (1930).

Comments When code works Sometimes I’m equally surprised as this baby when my code works.

Comments I still don’t know how this works I was at Disney Animation when they first showed us the animatronics for the new Beauty and the Beast ride for Tokyo Disneyland.

Click the image for the full length video.

Comments Planning work I’m sure many of you saw this gif in various places recently.

Comments Rolling upgrades The gif this week is the first of many I’ve made with a focus on teaching engineering concepts.

Comments Do you know how to say no?

Comments Shipping code that doesn’t catch fire Sometimes I push code into production that I’m certain will work well.

Comments Practice I’ve been on a diet and I’m pretty sure this cat has better sit-up form than I have.

Comments Hidden work I never thought about how donuts were filled.

Comments Balance Learning how to ride a bike requires you to balance in new ways.

Comments One more feature It’s difficult with software to know when to stop and release what you have.

Comments Company presentations and movie magic I often watch conference talks from companies that appear to be complete internal products, but behind the scenes are more like the blackbird car in the gif above.

Comments The weight of nothing Sometimes we make decisions in software and design that appear to have no impact on what we’re building.

Comments HTML There were some conversations on Twitter this past weekend that HTML is not a programming language.

Comments Open Source There’s been a lot of open source news this week between my current employer and Elastic.

Comments Learning to code The more programming languages I learn the more it resembles human language for me.

Comments Learning new things The gif reminded me of what it feels like to be new to something.

Since this is the 1st newsletter I’ll explain how it works.

Slack is a major part of how we communicate at work.

Hi, I’m Justin.

GitHub’s UI has improved a lot over the years but sometimes you just need quick access without clicking.