Lethain

One thing that bothered me about Imprint's product after joining was our lack of passkey support.Passkey support is a rare opportunity to increase resiliency to phishing attackswhile simultaneously reducing login friction. If it's good for our members, ou

I've recently been thinking a lot about the concept of "soil horizons",which is the idea that there are many distinct layers of soil, from topsoil all the way downto bedrock, which all combine into a soil horizon.Translating this idea into software, the i

Eight years ago, I wrote about my theory of restoring struggling teams,which came down to four steps:A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before.Solve by hiring more.A team is treading water if they're able to get th

From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments,which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is thatyour mistakes reveal themselves next month rather than next year, because things go w

Last week, a colleague asked why I'd hired an additional new leader ontoan important area rather than expanding an existing leader's scope toincorporate that area as well. The existing leader was a known quantityand doing well, so why not keep expanding t

One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized.For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate,but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement,

At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice,where the actor in a sentence is unclear.For example, my software didn't compile. That's a good exampleof the passive voice.However, you might not know the full set of rules,because here are som

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete.Our database migrations were run manually, too.Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remar

While Staff Engineer was first and foremostan attempt to pull the industry towards my perspective on staff-plus engineering roles,writing it also changed my opinions in a number of ways.Foremost, it solidified my belief that the industry too often treats

When we launched Digg v4, the old site turned off,but the new site didn't turn on.There was a lot of pressure to get things working,but no one knew what to do about it. It took almost a monthto get it wholly functioning. It was not a pleasant month,with m