I’ve been involved with infrastructure - building it, running it, or leading teams that do - for quite a long time. Much has changed over the years to be sure, but one thing has remained constant: the customers of our infrastructure want us to do everything in our power to make it never fail. This is an impossible task, obviously. We can get pretty close in a private, on-premises environment, with tools at our disposal such as active/standby or active/active(/active/…) networking devices, highly...
Interviewing candidates for first-level manager positions is something that I’ve done quite a bit over the course of my career. I would guess that I’ve interviewed at least a hundred or more candidates looking to take on a first-level manager role. I can’t say that I’ve been consistently good at it. It’s taken years of practice, and the thing you learn with practice is that you always need more practice. During my time at Amazon I phone screened anywhere from one or two, to half a dozen or more...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! I’ve been absent for a while due to other priorities, but it’s time to get back to it. I’ve got a ton of links in my reading list, but the ones below are those that have been most interesting to me lately. Here’s the curated list of links for the week ending June 19th, 2022: Molly White dose a great job of laying out the challenges and concerns around the notion of Sovereign Identity in her long-ish post Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! The links are a little thin this week as I’ve been a bit busier than usual, but there are still quite a few worth checking out. Below is the curated list for the week ending March 13th, 2022: Good thoughts from Tom Gillis about the Log4j vulnerability in The Lessons Of Log4J: It May Seem Like Last Year’s News, But Don’t Ignore The Implications Of This Attack. If you run infrastructure, there are some good lessons in this post about Applying Product Thinking to Slack’s...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! From time to time I’ll share a curated set of links to blogs, news stories, product information, etc. that have caught my attention. I find that it’s useful to provide the links with a small amount of context so that you, the reader, don’t have to blindly click the link without knowing why I found it interesting. Below is the curated list for the week ending March 6th, 2022: The power consumption of data centers is well-known, but I had less familiarity with some of...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! From time to time I’ll share a curated set of links to blogs, news stories, product information, etc. that have caught my attention. I find that it’s useful to provide the links with a small amount of context so that you, the reader, don’t have to blindly click the link without knowing why I found it interesting. Below is the curated list for the week ending February 27th, 2022: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has dominated the news this week. It’s a long-ish read,...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! From time to time I’ll share a curated set of links to blogs, news stories, product information, etc. that have caught my attention. I find that it’s useful to provide the links with a small amount of context so that you, the reader, don’t have to blindly click the link without knowing why I found it interesting. Below is the curated list for the week ending February 20th, 2022: Build vs. Buy has always been a contentious topic, and Matt Asay bring some ammo to the...
Note: This is part one of a two-part series discussing how we think about Disaster Recovery in the technology world In conversations with other technologists, I still frequently hear people talk about “Disaster Recovery” (DR) even when their applications are hosted in the public cloud. Coincidentally, the last few months have seen some high-profile issues and outages at more than one CSP, and there have been a flurry of blog posts, news stories, and breathless tweets about “reconsidering” using...
For years and years I’ve been in the habit of “keeping my workspace clean” by closing apps when I’m not actively using them. This started way back in the early Windows days when RAM was precious and OS crashes we far more frequent than they are today. Fast forward a few decades and I’m still in the habit, both on Windows as well as macOS, despite the fact that every machine I interact with on a regular basis has plenty of CPU and RAM. I’m going to work on breaking that habit. I’ve just received...
Welcome to Sleepless Links! From time to time I’ll share a curated set of links to blogs, news stories, product information, etc. that have caught my attention. I find that it’s useful to provide the links with a small amount of context so that you, the reader, don’t have to blindly click the link without knowing why I found it interesting. Below is the curated list for the week ending February 13th, 2022: For anyone who has been working to integrate OKRs into their organization’s way of...