Lately, I have been fascinated with researching the behaviors of Staff Engineers. They focus on having the highest possible impact on the organization. Generally, this means enabling and leveling up others around them over just concentrating on their personal contributions. As a Senior engineer, I still do a lot of designing and implementing instead of being primarily others-focused. However, I still try to pick up these behaviors and use them on the side when fitting....

The Prime Video team made some waves back in March when they wrote about refactoring their distributed microservices application into a monolith . It was a topic of various Medium and LinkedIn posts. Then two weeks later Werner Vogels published a follow-up post Monoliths are not Dinosaurs . Generally, Werner is presenting about microservices and distributed event-driven architectures at Re:Invent, but he seemed to step in here to say engineering judgment is important and microservices are not always the right decision....

CAP Theorem Recently I listened to CAP Theorem 23 Years Later with Eric Brewer on the Software Engineering Daily podcast. I didn’t recognize the name at first (shame on me), but it was very cool to hear about the CAP theorem from the original postulator. I haven’t had a chance to work on distributed systems in real life, but I find the topic fascinating. Coordinated cache eviction was the closest I’ve come....

I like RSS as an idea/protocol as well as a reading experience. It is one of the few places on the internet where you can consume only desired content and don’t have algorithms pushing something else. Pulling RSS feeds from various sites embodies the peer-to-peer nature of the internet. Over time, we have swayed toward central entities being our conduit to information contained on other sites (Google, Facebook, Twitter, link aggregators like Reddit)....

Both Reddit and Twitter made policy changes over the last couple of months to restrict API access purportedly due to large increases in LLM training traffic. Centralized Social Media I was just refreshing myself on the Reddit situation timeline on Wikipedia . Reuters reported February 14 that Reddit was looking to IPO in the second half of 2023. April 18th brought the announcement that Reddit would be charging for API access after a 60-day notice period ( Reddit , The Verge )....

I went out on a limb and signed up for a book club , hoping to glean some useful concepts and see what interesting people I might meet at discussion time. As a side note, this was the first time I had heard about Chatham House Rule . It lays a groundwork for an open discussion of ideas and kind of reminds me of open-source software licenses. 😃 When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed....

When I started writing, I anticipated it would be mostly text with the occasional diagram included. But my most recent post was long enough I figured a picture might make it a bit more interesting. I knew I could store the images in my Hugo static site repo, but I didn’t want the over-time slowdown caused by having to clone even small images. I wanted to host them outside the posts repo....

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this breaking news… Truly. I was going to write a post on Team Topologies I read for an upcoming book club . Now, that will be pushed to next week. :) Preconditions Our hot water heater had stopped working, and we were thinking it was probably the heating element. I got some advice to at least call a plumber and see what they would charge since it was a bit tedious to do the repair....

Today we will follow up on my previous post about programmable platforms and delve into WebAssembly as an implementation option. I have read about WebAssembly on the CloudFlare blog since 2019, but my interest piqued the other day when listening to the Software Snack Bites podcast about WebAssembly . The 1.0 spec was published in December 2019 which started a marked uptick in awareness. Notable implementations include Wasmtime by the Bytecode Alliance (writers of the spec) and the CNCF project WasmEdge ....

Back in April, I read one of Gergley’s newsletters on Steve Yegge and Developer Productivity . It was a very insightful and enjoyable read, but the part that stood out to me was not the main topic of the post. It was a semi-famous (but unknown to me) piece Steve wrote after six years of tenure at both Amazon and Google. Known as Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant , it contrasts Amazon’s and Google’s execution and mindset....