Posts in collaboration

I Was Trying to Sound Smart, and Now I Regret It

Maybe it’s because I’m an immigrant desperately trying to fit in. Maybe it’s one more way of keeping the imposter syndrome at bay. Whatever the reason, I’ve always been low-key obsessed with software development lingo. I’d go through meetings dropping principles and laws every chance I got. I’d lurk Slack channels waiting for a chance to pounce on a conversation to say “That’d make it worse based on Brooke’s Law” or “You’re falling for confirmation bias!”. Because I thought that gave me street cred. Same way I’d cover my laptop with stickers to showcase all the frameworks I knew and the conferences I’ve been to (but only if it was a modern framework and a “cool” conference). Just last week, I wrote a post teaching an imaginary audience about Conway’s Law and posted it on the social network for professional narcissists.

written in collaboration, sociotechnical Read on →

Pulling an Inverse Conway Maneuver at Netflix

When I first joined the Netflix Platform team circa 2020, the Observability offering was composed of a series of tools serving different purposes. There was Atlas for metrics, Edgar for distributed tracing, Radar for Logs and Alerts, Lumen for dashboards, Telltale for app health, etc. It was a portfolio of about 20 different apps. Big and small, ranging from business-specific tools to analyze playback sessions to low-level tools for CPU profiling.

written in architecture, collaboration, sociotechnical Read on →

How Platform Teams Get Shit Done

[Pete Hodgson][1] explored the different ways in which a Platform team works with other teams to get shit done in [this article][2]. I thought it was interesting to see how collaboration changes based on the type of work, so I put together this visual summary to compare and contrast each type of interaction.

written in collaboration, migrations, platform Read on →