The Default State Is Broken

In 17 days, I and my partner will be sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on a 7-day Caribbean cruise and I will be entirely unreachable for the better part of 10 days including travel days. When I was an individual contributor, this was fine; I made sure my work was handed off to someone, I made sure my tickets were up to date, and I told my boss I was going, and then I walked away. But now, I  am the boss. There are things, including interfacing with the clients, that no one else on my team is even authorized  to do by dint of corporate policy. Now, this isn't insurmountable; my boss knows I'm going to be unavailable, I'm getting everything lined up and squared away before I leave, and I'll be doing a handoff briefing before I leave. But honestly, I now totally understand why sometimes managers have a tough time stepping away. There's a lot hanging over my head, and I definitely don't want it hanging over my team's head because they already have enough hangi...

The single biggest speedbump on my transition from Individual Contributor to Manager is the realization that I need to hire people that have skills that I don't have, but I'm not sure how to test for those skills to make sure I'm hiring correctly. Listen, hiring is HARD. It's hard, y'all. Interviews are difficult and as far as I can tell don't actually give a good measure of how a person is going to react or what a person knows. Technical interviews can only do so much, especially when you're hiring for niche positions. Eventually, you just have to make a call and trust you do it right. Sometimes, you get to take a chance on someone who maybe doesn't exactly fit the background, but you like their spirit and you want to give them an opportunity and so you get a great self-learner who is eager for each task and really knows her shit and is working actively to learn more. And that's great! And then sometimes you give into time pressure and you go wi...

I was having dinner with a friend the other night, and we were talking about a bunch of things, including the state of the current culture of the Technology Industry, which is where we all work... me, my friend, my spouse, most of my social circle, etc. And we were talking about definitions and the corporate tendency to take interesting philosophies and turn them into undifferentiated pablum designed to keep labour fighting amongst themselves. Take, for instance, "Agile". It started, I understand, as a philosophy to help developers work together better as teams instead of a mass of individuals, as the modern codebase has for the most part moved beyond the idea of the artisanal coder, carefully banging away at his (almost always his ) codeforge to craft the perfect piece of individual bespoke software for the discerning, carefully chosen consumer-slash-patron. As software development turned into a team sport, and the experience of coding became an assembly line function, the q...

OK, today the "being unemployed" thing feels real for the first time since Thursday. That said, I went and did my in-person meet, I'm signed up and filing for UI, and I'm actively searching for a new gig. Plus, as I've said to several people over the last several days, I no longer wake up with a pit of dread in my stomach. I no longer feel like I have to take my anti-anxiety meds on a twice-daily basis. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders -- I no longer have to go back to a job that I really didn't like -- and while being unemployed isn't a great thing, my partner and I have been here before, and this time we're in a better place than the last time. Being laid off isn't the worst thing that can happen, and we can deal with it. We have a plan and a budget and each other, and that's a lot more than some people in my position have. I'm ready to see what happens next. FYI, if you know someone who's h...

I believe I got the quote from Cory Doctorow, and he credited a designer who's name I've never been able to find or credit, so feel to let me know if you know the source. EDIT: Cory was kind enough to let me know that this is from Dr. Don Norman , experiential designer and founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. But the quote as I remember it is this: "The default state of technology, any technology from stone axes to modern computers, the default state of technology is 'broken'." It's true, too; technology as a definition is something that is created  and thus must be maintained . The axe is possibly the earliest and easiest example: axes that aren't sharp are spectacularly bad axes. For really, really long time we survived on technology and tools that were only moderately more complicated than our own fingers and teeth, and thus technology was relatively easy to maintain and manage, but still: a dull knife is a failure mode. A snapped bowstring...

Think of your business as a bedroom -- let's say you're a homeowner and you're looking to rent out your spare bedroom on AirBnB or something like that (we'll leave the troublesome methodology of companies like AirBnB or Uber for some other day when I have the ability to produce TWO multi-thousand-word rants about business decisions). Your bedroom is a business, and your production environment is the bed -- mattress (front-end), box-spring (back-end), bedframe (infrastructure). Your Operations team is the woman who changes the sheets (product release), and this is where things get tricky. If you're running a shady, quasi-illegal operation out of your spare bedroom, the woman who changes the sheets is probably you, and you're probably not a professional housekeeper. You just want clean sheets that keep the mattress from getting horked up by the weirdo from Brooklyn with the Macbook Pro who leaves beard trimmings in the sink. In this case, you do what any reasona...

In any organization, IT or not, that is larger than zero people, there needs to be a way for the organization to identify, track, and resolve work. The tricky part is how you define "work", because that actually means a bunch of things: Work means "hours spent by workers on tasks", but it also means "the product of the hours spent by workers on tasks" and "future hours to be spent" and "future products as a result of spent".  For the purposes of this rant/manifesto, we're going to define "you" not as a generalized vagary, but a very specific person. You, in this case, are "Tanya". Because this is fiction, I'm going to really go out on a limb and be wildly divergent from reality, so you, Tanya, are a young woman in tech (you can already tell this is fiction). You've spent your college years suffering through the horrible sexism and racism to finally graduate with your Computer Science degree, and you and f...

So a non-trivial number of people whom I respect and enjoy have made the very same mistake about a bunch of inter-related application usage patterns specifically about social media tools and the infrastructures therein. That's a complicated starting sentence, so let me give a specific example (which is just the latest in a long line of argumentation all of a theme): the excellent CGP Grey  made an argument about Youtube and why it can't be better at serving up videos and be more like Netflix when presenting content. It's an excellent point, to be fair: Youtube is fantastically bad at serving up content that I want in the way that I want it when I'm trying to watch stuff, and I'm not even a publisher; CGP Grey's problems are at least twice the difficulty level from mine. The problem is, of course, that the problem reverts to a very old axiom that I've used since I heard it the first time: nearly every question that starts with "why" can be answ...

Today I spent most of my day in a windowless room cut off from the internet and the greater world, with no access to electricity, writing in my notebook, while a couple hundred other people did mostly the same thing. It was called Puppet Camp , and sadly it was not a day-camp where they taught me to make puppets (though, given that this is Portland, I'm sure that's actually something I could do). Today was when a handful of people talked at me about Puppet Enterprise application, which is a configuration and automation management tool from Puppet Labs. I like Puppet; it's pretty nifty and if I were starting up my own company *shudder*  I would probably mandate using Puppet from the get-go to reduce technical debt. One of the speakers today said "There is no future where IT is smaller or less important" and I agree, but I often feel like there are companies out there that don't understand how important dedicated Operations tools and Operations personnel are. ...

Today is a Monday, and that means it's time to do something new. Mondays get a lot of guff, much of it entirely reasonable guff; going back to work or starting a new week can often be difficult, especially if you're looking at another week of 'more of the same' of whatever it was that had you looking so longingly towards Friday last week. Mondays are when things seem to loom before you, when the work seems grindy and the leisure time seems very, very far away. But Mondays are also a chance to shake things up; to plan the rest of the week and break everything down and divide and conquer. They're the strategy day, the day when you find out what happened last week while everyone was racing for Friday. Mondays are when stuff gets planned (and if you're doing your planning on Sundays, shame on you and more importantly shame on your boss, because it's hurting your productivity if you're working on weekends). Mondays are when teams can assess their load and...

There's a really tough part to the grind of being unemployed: the waiting. The UI department doesn't care that it's Thanksgiving. It doesn't care that I've had a couple of phone interviews with a place, or that I'm waiting on a callback. It doesn't care that my stomach is tied up in knots and I'm having trouble sleeping. It only cares that I've looked for work, and that I haven't yet been hired. In a way, it's been really good training for working on issues and getting myself used to the idea of managing my time better, and good practice at applying Kanban in places other than the workplace, and how organizing myself makes things easier (significantly easier, as I get older). I have had trouble in the past with writing things down , on the belief that I could just "remember" things, despite never, ever being able to remember anything at all. I once forgot my own name. So practicing the process is good. The set goals and dete...

I was having lunch with a friend the other day and they were selling me on applying for a position in their company, which I was totally up for and interested in and in fact had already done for a couple of other positions. And the point we kept coming back to was the idea that I was "overqualified" or that somehow putting in for this job would be "beneath" me. Now, this is a customer-facing position in a software company where the users are generally going to be relatively bright engineers or sysadmins, so it's not exactly a Comcast Helpdesk job, but there was still this stigma, this idea both in their head and in the culture in general that a customer-facing role, any  customer-facing role, is somehow less  than a job as, say, a developer, or a devops job, or something like that. I worked in a technical support role for six years, the last three or so in a supervisory role (mostly because if I'd've taken the "manager" title, my salary woul...

Once again I remain convinced that there is no problem that is insurmountable when a possible first-draft solution includes a hacked-together bash script. I spent the better part of an hour trying to bang my head against Windows, gave up, and grabbed my Mac laptop, opened a terminal, and accomplished the end-goal in 10 minutes, which included writing my own hacky first-draft do_the_thing.bash file. More and more, my solutions (including production-ready solutions in some cases) start life as do_the_thing.bash, and eventually evolve into a proper script with error conditions, failure modes, self-checks to prevent multiple runs, etc. But mostly, they start as do_the_thing.bash, which I blame a developer friend for doing in front of me and thereby teaching me terrible habits. My own personal goal, after I get back from my convention trip, is to throw away do_the_thing.bash and rewrite the entire process, soup to nuts, in python (including checking for ruby and installing it if needed,...