Many, many, blog posts by Alex Kessinger (frequent inventor of words). on Rumproarious

I was a front-end engineer before the iPhone existed.

Karpathy recently posted about using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases — collecting raw sources into a directory, having an LLM “compile” them into a wiki of interlinked markdown files, and viewing the whole thing in Obsidian.

After a long hiatus, David and I are bringing the StaffEng podcast back.

You want to get hard things done, and you want to tackle progressively bigger things.

Once you’ve decided to adopt a new view of safety, and want to help an organization change, how do you know if you are changing anything?

From my tiny West Berkeley apartment, with my family asleep upstairs, I typed into the search box: “python Berkeley”.

Writing down remediation items is a seductively simple outcome for a post-mortem.

Software is key to a growing number of businesses.

(A hypothetical dependency graph that led to a systemic failure in AWS us-east-1 from @0xdabbad00) Like many, I was personally affected by the AWS outage last week.

Striving to be better, made me.

Members of the SRE team explain how their engagement with the entire software lifecycle has enabled Google to build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world.

Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance.

Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle.

A group of researches who’ve studied the daily standup for over a decade summarize their research and provide recommendations for how to make standups more valuable.

Researchers studying software engineering often choose inappropriate methods.

When it comes to creating a start-up there’s prevailing wisdom.

Interviews provide a rich set of qualitative experiences to analyze, but they require a high level of effort to achieve high quality results.

The Field Guide to Understanding ’Human Error’ will help you understand a new way of dealing with a perceived ‘human error’ problem in your organization.

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited.

In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking…

In my professional roles the word engineer is in the title somewhere.

The infrastructure of my productivity is a set of tools that revolve around plain text files.

I use Go off and on.

There is a book.

I think about this sometimes.

I have worked on projects that missed the deadline by years.

Conventional Wisdom can be a bunch of BS.

I like most people am deathly afraid of crypto.

It’s easy to see Kubernetes as “a way to run containerized workloads”.

I’m torn between two axes.

DevOps, at least as I understand it, is about delivering value.

The biggest irony in dev work is that we all want to build easy to use systems, but that’s hard to impossible to do.

It’s not often that anyone can take up basic linux literacy and make it interesting, but Julia Evans1 does it with style.

When I design a new service, I want it to be efficient.

Given I don’t know what I don’t know, but I want to find out.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

There will be commit messages.

I am a fan of tests, but my testing journey was long and fraught.

During the course of my work I find my self rubberbanding between two extremes - universal truth and exacting, excruciating detail at a specific moment in time.

But, how do they work?

Whatever it is that you do, if you have wondered about increasing productivity, improving outcomes or creating more long lasting value, you owe it to your self to learn a little about the study of systems.

There must be a large and storied body of literature when it comes to curation, but I am unfortunately not familiar.

Being a child of the 80s I can recall a time before the internet permeated my entire reading experience.

Gonna start out the month with a fun and simple one.

500+ articles to read.

Well, around 3ish years ago I stared working for a company that sells software to libraries and I didn’t know a thing.

Managing IAM credentials is a burden.

JSON Feed is a new format for syndication that was developed by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece.

After learning about JSON Feed I took some time to implment a template for Hugo.

I share Gabe Weatherheads sentiment about blogging.