Writing — the long version
Show your working
Outages, post-mortems and the occasional argument. Written by the people who were on the pager for it, not by a content team.
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23 May 2024
- Culture
- Reliability
My biggest fuck up
War storyTwenty-two years old, first day as a developer, production database dropped. What happened next is the whole argument for what an engineering culture actually is.
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16 May 2024
- Platform engineering
- Culture
Lies, damned lies, and complexity
ArgumentWe built the first cloud in Europe and replaced the hypervisor in 30 days when Oracle pulled the licences. Most of what gets called complexity is just ignorance with a talking point attached.
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14 May 2024
- Hiring
- Leadership
- Culture
The Hiring Pool
Playbook“Your standards are too high” and “your process is too long” are both right and both wrong. On turning down big tech, and building a hiring process that qualifies competency without taking three months.
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10 May 2024
- Leadership
- Culture
Continuous Improvement
War storyThe no-asshole rule works when you also pay top of market and qualify competency. Without those, it becomes the tool that removes the person saying the company is not very good at this.
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2 May 2024
- Leadership
- Hiring
- Culture
Culture of Competency
Argument“Technology is easy; culture is hard” is a sales pitch. In a business that sells software, the engineering org is the engine that delivers revenue, and its competency is the culture.
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30 April 2024
- Leadership
- Hiring
3 reasons you shouldn't hire a Technical CTO
SatireA straight-faced case for hiring a visionary who works on the org rather than in it, staffing eight layers of oversight above the developer, and then offshoring the developer.
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19 November 2022
- Reliability
- Platform engineering
Nobody expects the thundering herd
War storyServers fell over every lunchtime. A blocking query backed up the syncs, the retries took out the cache, the cache took out auth, and 40,000 customers stopped trading. Pulling the security group bought a day at a time.
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20 August 2019
- Platform engineering
- Security
- Culture
The Iron Grip of Legacy IT
SatireSix months into a transformation programme, told as a horror story: the AWS account that never arrives, the Windows EDR running under Wine, and the change board that approves it.
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18 August 2019
- Security
- Platform engineering
End user devices don't matter
SatireA CISO, a consultancy and nine and a half million dollars of endpoint tooling. You cannot secure the end user device — so stop putting it inside the trusted network.
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3 August 2019
- Security
- Platform engineering
- Culture
DevOps is going to get you hacked
SatireThree consultants stand up Bitbucket, Jenkins and AWS, and it passes assurance. A mistyped username, credentials in a public repo and a token on a compromised laptop — none of which a pentest looks at.
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30 July 2019
- Security
- Platform engineering
Learning from Capital One's misery
AnalysisA misconfigured firewall, an over-privileged role, unencrypted PII and nobody watching the egress. Four failures, and the peer review, SAST, DAST and monitoring that catch each one.
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