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:

Article concepts:

  • Glue Work is mandatory
  • No surprises
  • Great VPEs tolerate uncertainty and despite misalignment
  • Headcount planning with Headcount ratios (rather than fixed numbers)
  • “Investment thesis rather than ranked prioritiesp” e.g. don’t just stackrank priorities but blend them
  • “Novelty driven development” – yeah, stop doing wasteful stuff to do a new thing
  • Discounted future developer velocity
  • “Probalistic decision making” / “dealing with ambiguitiy as a leader” / etc
  • drafting coefficient - businesses that leverage your existing businesses
  • “It’s OK to make some bad decisions” – work across rounds not within them; learning from bad decisions and learning overall is more important than any individual decision; try to fail fast tho
  • “how to build cohesive hiring decisions in manager loops / interview loops”
  • “The Waiting Place” - dr suess book but also the havoc of illiquid paper money
    • story of eng leader writin their network on the whiteboard at a previous co – both lol, how did that happen and also, “a lot but not enough”
    • is there a https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ for long-tenured leaders in general, but sort of inverse? e.g. do many of best leave field when financially prudent? (only remainers are relatively speaking financially unsuccessful or have other psychological reasons for continuing to participate)
    • The emperor’s unicorn clothes — conviction and honesty when everyone is afraid of losing generational wealth. This is why we need better financial instruments to align incentives. Also the “alliance” career concept over ownership. Not mercenaries but allies
  • “Stop selling vitamins.” / “Don’t write about vitamins” e.g. Lara Hoagn article is about problem w/managers not just manager voltron
  • “Brutalist programming” ala brutalist architecture
  • https://lethain.com/engineering-manager-archetypes/
  • “Working across timeframes rather than within timeframes” https://lethain.com/iterative-elimination-tournaments/
  • Why does every company hate their knowledge base?
  • How i debug in production
  • Challenges of managing technical quality
  • Connecting services migration with technical quality: # files changed per feature, try to drive down this p50, # PRs / deploy – want this to be p90 of 1, E.g. trunk based development, # files with more than 1,000 lines of code modified, Minimize change density, have few files that change in most commits
  • Gradual migration from JavaScript to TypeScript
  • How do you create a learning organizatoin?
  • “be a change sink”
  • staff-plus to director-plus ratios
  • Why SDKs are the real interfaces (not APIs)
  • Sabbaticals – do they work?
  • “Flying wedge” how flocks join companies
  • How to have career conversations that start with “I have no idea what I want to do”
  • Are you a entry vehicle company (e.g. hiring folks at the gap between their internal process and the beginning expectations for Staff?) Do you know what Staff means? Can you teach people that? Do you actually need the role?
  • “Accommodation rather than equality” Some interviewing, hiring, leveling notes
  • Career defining roles
  • Some general life advice

Stuff not to write about:

  • Remote