because writing is clarifying

26 Oct 2019

On Public Speaking

Public speaking is one of the most uncomfortable things I do. Though I’ve spoken occasionally over time, despite knowing the subject and…

09 Oct 2019

Penalties and Purgatory

I spoke on this topic at the ServerlessConf New York on October 8, 2019. Below are the slides and speaker notes. The thesis of my talk is…

27 Sep 2019

Forming Failure Hypothesis

Subjecting systems to failures is supposed to increase confidence in their stability. But why? How do you form useful failure hypotheses…

18 Jul 2019

If Only Production Incidents Could Speak

Below are the slides and extended speaker notes from my talk on July 18, 2019, at OSCON 2019 with the same title as this post. See my…

10 Jun 2019

Status Management

I learned about “status management” recently while reading Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code. Since then I can not stop seeing status…

30 May 2019

Opinions

Some of the best meetings I’ve had in recent years are those that I have had no opinions on. These were meetings where folks had…

26 Feb 2019

Incidents — Trends from the Trenches

Most publicized production incidents are war stories. Each involves drama with dead ends, twists and turns, and a victory at the end…

10 Jan 2019

The Value is in Dealing with the Messy Stuff

Over the last several years, I had the opportunity to lead a few projects that were too large for any single team to execute. I also dealt…

29 Dec 2018

Contemporary Views on Serverless and Implications

We want near-instantaneous elasticity of resources and never have to pre-allocate resources or pay for more resources than needed. We also…

19 Nov 2018

Taming the Rate of Change

These are great times for pushing code to production. Thanks to the cloud, micro-services, and investments in CI/CD pipelines, teams that…

20 Jun 2018

Cloud Optimization Circus

If you are a cloud adopter rapidly adopting cloud services, but not developing the finance governance muscle, you will certainly be…

11 Feb 2018

DevOps and Governance

Regulation and threat aware DevSecOps culture is where DevOps was 5–10 years ago. Auditors, controls, regulations and compliance are not…

12 Nov 2017

Serverless: Looking Back to See Forward

Last week, I attended an all-day CIO forum on cloud in Seattle, organized by one of Seattle’s top venture fund groups. Several notable…

29 Sep 2017

Technology Decision Making and Architecture Reviews

In this note, I would like to implore you to not use architecture reviews as a means to improve quality of technology decisions. Instead, I…

18 Sep 2017

Accept | Tentative ✓ | Decline

I’m done with the excuse of not being in charge of my time. Over the last two months, I started taking a few steps to deliberately simplify…

31 Jul 2017

Paying it Forward

I recently had an opportunity to volunteer for an Indonesian company called Vasham through the RippleWorks Foundation. Over a period of…

27 Jul 2017

DevOps, Postmortems and Cloud Spend

As I wrote previously here, here, and most recently here, I’m a strong advocate and practitioner of “cost awareness as part of DevOps…

21 Jun 2017

DevOps is not DevOps

I learned DevOps the hard way about five years ago when I inherited some infrastructure and software that had zero automation and…

20 May 2017

How do We Manage Cloud Spend at Expedia

Since writing State of AWS Compute Pricing, several people asked me how we manage the cloud spend at Expedia. My colleague Abiade Adedoyin…

13 Apr 2017

There is No Pendulum

As public cloud spend goes up, will the pendulum swing back to enterprise data centers? Sorry, but there is no pendulum to swing back.