It’s not Impostor Syndrome
If you’re a Junior Engineer and you feel overwhelmed from time to time, I have good news: You don’t have Impostor Syndrome.
Mastery is mastery of the basics
When members of my community ask about the skills required to reach a more senior engineering role, most of them think of key technologies such as React for frontend developers or Kubernetes for operations engineers. However, my perspective is different. Those key technologies, while interesting and (sometimes) important, come and go. What doesn’t change is…
Don’t push harder. Reduce friction.
In my work as a CTO, I’m thinking about friction a lot. I’m using this physics term as an analogue for everything that reduces team efficiency. This kind of friction can have substantial financial and human cost, which is why I find it important to notice and mitigate it when ever I can. In mechanical…
Introducing The Server Room, your DevOps community hub!
After weeks of preparation, I’m happy to announce that The Server Room is now open! No, that’s neither a cooling problem nor a security breach. “The Server Room” is my new DevOps community of practice for software engineers, system administrators, SRE, and all kinds of DevOps people. And it’s launching today! You can sign up right away…
Five skills every junior engineer needs to succeed
In my conversations with junior engineers, especially during my live streams, a question that comes up a lot in different variations is: “What skills do I have to be successful?” I thought I’d summarize my recommendations in this article. Analysing problems The first skill any junior engineer needs is problem-solving. As a software engineer, your…
80-hour weeks don’t make a great engineer. They’ll break a great engineer.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I was shocked by a question about working hours that I got during a recent office hour live stream. “So I heard from a developer that he would code and learn for like 80 hours a week when he started in order to be come an amazing engineer. I…
Where is all the exciting technology?
This article is about boring technology. And as an exception, I don’t mean “boring” in the sense of established and reliable technology that I recommend you use instead of chasing the latest hype. No, I mean that technology in general has become boring for the most part. In his article “Plateauing technology and boring computing“,…
Startup lessons: 5 mistakes I made when I chose my brand name
When I chose “Opsitive” as the brand name for my teaching business, I thought it was a clever play on words. But it wasn’t smart at all.
Un-breaking breaking changes using feature flags
Feature flags are useful not only to roll out new features gradually, but also to limit the blast radius of breaking changes.