Posts Tagged "Engineering"

Your Hiring Pipeline Has the Same Bug as Your Deploy Pipeline

A résumé parser matches tokens, not competence. It's the same mistake as infrastructure that describes state instead of maintaining it, and the same mistake as confusing 'can' with 'does.' Keyword-gated hiring optimizes a proxy and quietly filters out exactly the senior people it claims to want.

Load-Bearing Humans

A system that only keeps running because a person is continuously holding it up is not working. The person is working. The system is on life support. 'Working' is one more overloaded word, and most of the time it quietly means 'works as long as the right human is standing there.'

Nice People Who Give Us Money

We are not paid to solve interesting engineering problems. We are paid to make products that make customers happy, and a customer is a nice person who gives us money. Under that definition, monitoring, testing, deployment, security, and resilience are not 'non-functional requirements.' They are the function.

Gambling on Failure

Most people gamble on success — they assume the thing will work, and they're genuinely surprised when it doesn't. A tiny, birdlike kung fu master taught me to gamble on failure instead. Expect every move to be blocked, and win anyway. It turns out to be the same discipline that keeps systems alive at 2 AM.

Stop Holding Out for a Hero

Incident response is either an engineering discipline — measured, quantified, repeatable, owned, evaluated — or it is a craft a few heroes practice and nobody else can duplicate. Heroes are great. You shouldn't need them, and you shouldn't bet the company on still having them.

Don't Paint Yourself Into a Corner

Larry Wall built Perl around a principle: no unnecessary limitations. Most of the limitations we build into our own code aren't necessary either — they're laziness wearing the costume of caution, and every one is a wet patch of floor between you and the door. Stop boxing in your future self.

Most Infrastructure as Code Is Broken — and Reconciliation Is Only Half the Reason

Run terraform plan against infrastructure nobody has touched in a month and watch it propose changes. That drift is the absence of a reconciliation loop. But the missing loop is only half of why most Infrastructure as Code is broken — and bolting a loop onto the other half just gets you to broken faster.

There's More Than One Way to Get Observability Right

The specialize-versus-unify argument feels like a religious war. It isn't. Both sides are right — they're answering different questions. There are several ways to get observability right. The way to get it wrong is to never ask which one you're building for.