One of the classic failure modes of management is the empire-builder — the managers who measure their own status, rank or value by the number of teams and people “under” them. Eve… | Continue reading
My friend Molly has had an impressive career. She got a job as a software engineer after graduating from college, and after kicking ass for a year or so she was offered a promotion to management, w… | Continue reading
If you’re like most of us, you learned to debug as a baby engineer by way of printf(3). By the time you were shipping code to production you had probably learned to instrument your code with … | Continue reading
Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read,… | Continue reading
We have been interviewing and hiring a pile of engineering directors at Honeycomb lately. In so doing, I’ve had some fascinating conversations with engineering managers who have been trying u… | Continue reading
I have written a lot about the pendulum swing between engineering and management, so I often hear from people who are angsting about the transition. A quick recap of the relevant posts: The Enginee… | Continue reading
I’ve been at my current job for three years, and I am suddenly, accidentally, the most senior engineer on the team. I spend my days handling things like bootcamps, mentoring, architecture, an… | Continue reading
How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside? This seems to be on a lot o… | Continue reading
We hear this phrase constantly: “I worked at breaking down silos.” “We need to break down silos.” “What did I do in my last role? I broke down silos.” It sets my… | Continue reading
I’ve fallen way behind on my blog posts — my goal was to write one per month, and I haven’t published anything since MAY. Egads. So here I am dipping into the drafts archives! Thi… | Continue reading
The other day I said this on twitter — … which stirred up some Feelings for many people. 🙃 So I would like to explain my opinions in more detail. Static vs dynamic dashboards First, le… | Continue reading
“How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?” — An Engineering Manager Hey, real quick: how long have you been managing? If it’s less than two years, … | Continue reading
I recently received this gem of a note:: Hi Charity, I really enjoy your writing and a lot of it has directly contributed to me finally deciding to leave a company with a toxic management culture. … | Continue reading
Story time. Susan was hired as a database engineer. Her primary projects, which are supposed to be upgrading/rolling out a major point release and running load tests against various config options … | Continue reading
Most people aren’t doing true CI/CD. Most teams wait far too long to get their code into prod after writing it. Most painful of all are the teams who have done all the hard parts — wire… | Continue reading
“How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?” — An Engineering Manager Hey, real quick: how long have you been managing? If it’s less than two years, … | Continue reading
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been tweeting a LOT about lead time to deploy: the interval encompassing the time from when the code gets written and when it’s been deployed to produ… | Continue reading
There are few engineering topics that provoke as much heated commentary as oncall. Everybody has a strong opinion. So let me say straight up that there are few if any absolutes when it comes to doi… | Continue reading
There are few engineering topics that provoke as much heated commentary as oncall. Everybody has a strong opinion. So let me say straight up that there are few if any absolutes when it comes to doi… | Continue reading
I have begun to notice a common blind spot among engineers who are frustrated about leveling up, which is: not every opportunity exists at every company at every time | Continue reading
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets: (I originally titled this arti… | Continue reading
My company has recently begun pushing for us to build and staff out what I can only describe as “command centers”. They’re picturing graphs, dashboards…people sitting around… | Continue reading
It’s a question that tends to get asked a lot, in job interviews, 1x1s, and plain old casual conversation: “Why do you want to become a manager?”, and “Why did you decide to… | Continue reading
Dan Golant asked a great question today: “Any advice/reading on how to establish a team’s critical path?” I repeated back: “establish a critical path?” and he clarifie… | Continue reading
I follow you on Twitter and read your blog. I particularly enjoy this post: | Continue reading
Consider: Is it ethical to discriminate in whom you will sell to as a business? What would you do if you found out that the work you do every day was being used to target and kill migrants at the … | Continue reading
Last night I was talking with Mark Ferlatte about the advice we have given our respective companies in this pandemic era. He shared with me this link, on how to salvage a disastrous day. It’… | Continue reading
Last weekend, @swyx posted a great little primer to instrumentation titled “Observability Tools in JavaScript”. A friend sent me the link and suggested that I might want to respond and… | Continue reading
One of my stretch goals for 2019 was to start writing an advice column. I get a lot of questions about everything under the sun: observability, databases, career advice, management problems, what … | Continue reading
I just read this piece, which is basically a very long subtweet about my Friday deploy threads. Go on and read it: I’ll wait. Here’s the thing. After getting over some of the personal… | Continue reading
(With 🙏 to Joe Beda, whose brilliant idea for a blog post this was. Thanks for letting me borrow it!) Interviewing is hard and it sucks. In theory, it really shouldn’t be. You’re a hi… | Continue reading
I made a vow this year to post one blog post a month, then I didn’t post anything at all from May to September. I have some catching up to do. 😑 I’ve also been meaning to transcribe… | Continue reading
Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor… | Continue reading
How to blow up your entire infrastructure with this one great trick! Or, how you can isolate the blast radius of terraform explosions by using a separate state file per environment. | Continue reading
Part 1 Seven years ago I was working on backend infra for mobile apps at Parse, resenting MongoDB and its accursed single write lock per replica with all my dirty, blackened soul. That’s whe… | Continue reading
VOICEOVER: “Previously, on twitter …” So, that happened. I hadn’t seen anyone say something like this in quite a while. I remember saying things like this myself as recentl… | Continue reading
VOICEOVER: “Previously, on twitter …” So, that happened. I hadn’t seen anyone say something like this in quite a while. I remember saying things like this myself as recentl… | Continue reading
I got an interesting tweet the other day from @evntdrvn in response to this thread of mine. Paraphrasing, “So I’ve almost got our group at work up to Step 1 in your observability maturi… | Continue reading
Last night I was out with a dear friend who has been an engineering manager for a year now, and by two drinks in I was rattling off a long list things I always say to newer engineering managers. Th… | Continue reading
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The company is growing like crazy, your engineering team keeps rising to the challenge, and you are ferociously proud of them. But some cracks are be… | Continue reading
On Monday I gave a talk at DOES18 called “All the World’s a Platform”, where I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms … | Continue reading
On twitter this week, @srhtcn noted that “Many incidents happen during or right after release” and asked for advice on ways to fix this. And he’s right! Rolling out new software … | Continue reading
On twitter this week, @srhtcn noted that “Many incidents happen during or right after release” and asked for advice on ways to fix this. And he’s right! Rolling out new software … | Continue reading
On twitter this week, @srhtcn noted that “Many incidents happen during or right after release” and asked for advice on ways to fix this. And he’s right! Rolling out new software … | Continue reading
(Based on yesterday’s tweetstorm and the ensuing conversation, Let’s talk about influence. As an engineer, how do you get influence? What does influence look like, what is it rooted in… | Continue reading
(Based on yesterday’s tweetstorm and the ensuing conversation, Let’s talk about influence. As an engineer, how do you get influence? What does influence look like, what is it rooted in… | Continue reading
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story). The central drama for many people goes something like this: “I’m a senior engineer, but I’m thin… | Continue reading