Maybe Great Idea

You have a great idea for a software project. But… will it work? Is it actually a great idea? | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 1 year ago

Staff Engineer Communities

There haven’t been a lot of community structures or resources for Staff+ engineers. That’s changing. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 2 years ago

How many vacation days does it take to change a lightbulb?

I stopped using a todo list a while back. I put tasks into my calendar as meetings, then reschedule those meetings if I need to. Having all of the work already assigned a time slot (sometimes far in the future) means that when I have nothing scheduled, I don’t feel like I should  … | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 2 years ago

I love Advent of Code

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 3 years ago

Wrote some things!

Some recent writing: thinking of our future selves as stakeholders, leadership on the IC track, what a “real engineer” acts like, and the very exciting 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 3 years ago

Talks I like: Cultivating Architecture by Birgitta Boeckeler

Cultivating Architecture by Birgitta Boeckeler describes how to give teams autonomy without causing chaos. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 3 years ago

Being Kind

In most situations, people being nice is unremarkable, just a reasonable default. Being kind though, that’s a game changer. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 3 years ago

Project time without focus time

Why learning Android dev has been the perfect pandemic hobby. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 3 years ago

Conference Report: O'Reilly Software Architecture NYC 2020

I went to the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in NYC last week. I enjoyed it a lot but I was surprised by how little it overlapped with production/reliability conferences. Here’s my conference report. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Surviving the Organizational Side Quest

The most frustrating but most useful work can be unblocking blocked projects. But it’s sometimes an epic adventure to understands why it’s blocked. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Tuning the distraction machine

I've been working on how to make my phone less of a distraction machine. Here’s some stuff I’ve found helpful. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Can somebody volunteer to take notes?

The meeting is about to begin and the moderator asks "Can somebody take notes?". And then *nobody says a word*. Should you volunteer? | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Nine takeaways from the DevOps report

I like the DevOps report because it brings us actual statistics on what’s making software engineering organisations successful. Here’s nine things I’m thinking about after reading this year’s report. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Yes if: My first post on the Squarespace engineering blog

I love when engineering groups share what they’ve learned, and Squarespace’s engineering blog was one of the things that drew me to the company. So I’m really excited to have my first blog post up there: The Power of “Yes, If”. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Lightning talk: Nobody could have predicted this

What can you tell from an RFC or design document about how a system will fail? | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Continuous Lifecycle London Keynote

Software reliability, leadership for senior engineers, conference speaking and other random tech topics. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Conference Report: The Lead Developer NYC 2019

I went to The Lead Developer New York and I loved it. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Being Glue: The Making of Senior Engineers

Slides and notes for the Being Glue talk. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Conference SRECon Americas 2019

SRECon Americas was in Brooklyn this year! SRECon has always emphasised the human side of reliability and I appreciated the focus on learning and teaching, psychological safety and avoiding burnout, as well as a bunch of tech topics around keeping sites running. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 4 years ago

Working from sofa

Can other people do focused work from desks? I’ve never gotten the hang of it. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 5 years ago

Google Slides has an Unsplash integration!

Google Slides and I have spent a lot of time together, but our relationship is challenged every time I work with images. Until now! | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 5 years ago

Three things that went well in 2018

This isn't a full 2018 retrospective, but I wanted to write about three things I'm happy about from the year, all of which involved doing stuff that scared me. | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 5 years ago

"I wouldn't start from here". How to make a big technical change.

So much of the time, we have a vision for where we’d like our technology to be, but it sure would be nice to not start from where we are. Whether we’re adding support for IPv6, deprecating Nagios, introducing a DevOps culture or moving to microservices, we’ve got the same problem … | Continue reading


@noidea.dog | 5 years ago