https://sketches.lethain.com/Recent content on Exuberant SketchesHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usWill LarsonTue, 02 Mar 2021 08:12:06 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/writing-better/Tue, 02 Mar 2021 08:12:06 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/writing-better/I recently got a note from Bianca asking about writing, which is a topic I’ve tried to write about before, some of what I’ve wrote on this topic: Writing for Consumption (2008!)- mainly included because I wrote it in 2008 and it’s funny to read my old writing style How to be a tech influencer (2021) - my advice on how to do tech content distribution Why and How I write (2021) What I learned writing An Elegant Puzzle (2019?https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/measuring-eng-impact/Thu, 25 Feb 2021 18:52:09 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/measuring-eng-impact/This became Measures of engineering impact. At today’s engineering leader breakfast (an extremely virtual breakfast, these days), we chatted about measuring engineering impact, which is quite different from measuring engineering velocity, even though velocity is a major input into impact. Velocity metrics are the sort of things that you probably want to use to understand rather than to grade outcomes. Impact metrics should be things that you can grade against performance.https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/external-stakeholders/Thu, 18 Feb 2021 06:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/external-stakeholders/Yesterday I was chatting with someone when the eternal question to ex-Stripes came up, “When is Stripe going to IPO?” Personally, I haven’t the faintest clue, and from there the conversation moved towards Silicon Valley’s fascination with Stripe. Stripe does a lot of things well, and deserves credit for all of that, but I think the hardest thing that it does is often underappreciated: it manages to innovate quickly despite having a vast number of external stakeholders.https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/why-write/Sun, 14 Feb 2021 18:03:14 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/why-write/One of the things I’ve enjoyed in the TechWriters forum has been folks talking about their writing process. A few folks mentioned the Fieldstone writing technique by Weinsberg. I’ve enjoyed Weinsberg’s other books, like “Being a technical leader” and “Secrets of a consultant”, so I decided to give it a read. You can summarize the Fieldstone writing technique as: (1) collect related ideas in a file, (2) write stuff that energizes you, (3) switch projects to wherever you have the most energy.https://sketches.lethain.com/books/elegant-puzzle/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/elegant-puzzle/An Elegant Puzzle was my first book, published May, 2019. It’s available exclusively via Amazon, and was published by Stripe Press. An overview of the project is available here, and a number of additional posts are available on my blog under the elegant-puzzle tag. Sales Periodically updated sales tracker. Format October, 2019 January, 2021 Kindle Digital 4500 450 Hardcover 6000 710 Audiobook 1,500 234 total 12,780 33,493 Note that while all of the total numberes are accurate, but some of the format breakdown are estimates due to the reporting I have available.https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/innovation/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/posts/innovation/“Why can’t we do this in an hour?” Velocity: experiments, explorations, investments What are indicators Small innovations Large innovations – new fields, new products What accelerates velocity Developer workflows: check in, code review, test, deploy Stability: little time on failures, including reverts, etc Training Hiring Retention What accelerates innovation? Platforms Networks Users Brand Infrastructure Misaligned incentives around resourcing/investment prevent innovation Innovator’s dilemma & solution It’s easy to innovate into high-margin products that draft on core biz Feature-teams can’t innovate Escaping the build trap Empowered Then let’s assume you do those, then Innovation comes from ?https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/projects/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/projects/Some of these links point to private google docs, which is how I used to manage my personal wiki. I will migrate them at some point, but don’t hold your breath! Some potential projects to play with at some point Cue app “Reachable” / Webhook Dashboard: Ephemeral and persistent queues; HTTP/2 replay; HTTP/1 long-poll or quick response Solve the “can’t open hole in firewall” problem “Code hotspot finder” recommend sections of a repository to improve for productivity purposes, could even recommend files to split apart, etc!https://sketches.lethain.com/books/staff-engineer/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/staff-engineer/Learn more about Staff Engineer on staffeng.com. Sales Periodically updated sales tracker. Note that these are cumulutative sales as of a given date. Format 2021/2/13 2021/2/15 2021/3/24 Kindle Digital 700 762 1,371 Paperback 773 944 2,009 Gumroad: Personal (1x) 800 818 988 Gumroad: Team (15x) 20 20 25 Gumroad: Company (100x) 5 5 9 total 3,073 3,324 5,518https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/writing-ideas/Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/writing-ideas/Some of these links point to private google docs, which is how I used to manage my personal wiki. I will migrate them at some point, but don’t hold your breath! This page is a running backlog of topics that I’d like to write about at some point. Stories from my own experiences: Uber’s 18 hour Postgres outage Provisioning 2,000 services at Uber Increment’s founding story Article drafts:https://sketches.lethain.com/books/infra-eng-book/Thu, 11 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/infra-eng-book/How to operate and scale technical infrastructure and the infrastructure organizations that behind it Overview Properties Not technology focused Properties – for each property expand on the work to support it, how to measure it, etc Efficiency: nudges, leaderboards, budgets, goals, etc QoS and cost post from a few years ago Reliability: incident program, metrics, Productivity: docs (search, structured), bootcamp, mentoring, build, test, deploy, avoiding approval gates (process impact, quality views help here!https://sketches.lethain.com/books/ten-years-in-the-valley/Thu, 11 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/ten-years-in-the-valley/Yeah, just like, a ton of personal stories from https://lethain.com/tags/storieshttps://sketches.lethain.com/books/an-ethical-profession/Wed, 10 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/an-ethical-profession/When folks asks if I’ll write another book after An Elegant Puzzle, I sometimes joke that if I wrote another management book it would be An Ethical Profession, and I could refer to them as AEP1 and AEP2. There are just so many management situations that push you to look at them through an ethical perspective. A few of the situations that I’ve personally been in: Senior technical leader ordering you to pull a candidate’s offer after they’d already given notice at their previous job due to an awkward conversation.https://sketches.lethain.com/books/101-ways-developer-productivity/Tue, 09 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/books/101-ways-developer-productivity/Yeah, just like, 101 ways you could improve your and your team’s developer productivity. In a book.https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/talk-ideas/Tue, 09 Feb 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/meta/talk-ideas/Talk ideas: “40 year career” as a talk Why limiting work-in-progress works Measuring the unmeasurable / measurement in leadership in generalhttps://sketches.lethain.com/misc/about/Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:16:28 -0800https://sketches.lethain.com/misc/about/I’m Will Larson, and I’ve been writing on my blog, Irrational Exuberance for over a decade, in addition to a couple longer form writing projects, Staff Engineer and An Elegant Puzzle. As more folks have started to read my work, I’ve been thinking about how to find a home for the sorts of content that I enjoy writing but which are too unedited and rough to share with readers who expect writing to be written for them as opposed for for me.