🌶️ take from Charity Majors: "that poses an enormous threat to Datadog’s business model, which relies on storing (and charging for) the same data over and over and over and over again in different formats, then storing (and charging for) links between datasets, and all the attendant fees and costs."

Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars!

Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"

charity.wtf

To choose a path because it’s the right one, and not one with a reward is hard, but the best course of action in the long run.

I’m hiring an Infrastructure Engineer to join a small senior team at Buffer! AMA

Buffer@buffer.com · last wk.

We're hiring a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Buffer! 🎉 We're on a mission to help the next 200,000 creators and small teams build their brands. This role is foundational to making that happen! 🔗 Apply: buffer.com/journey/1ee8...

To all struggling dads with kids on holidays (while you’re not), I salute you 🫡

readwise.io/reader/share... Charity Majors: “Many people who love the art and craft of software are struggling in this moment, as the value of that craft is diminishing. People who take a much more…functional…approach to software seem to be thriving in the present chaos (…) most of the SREs I know”

My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote | annotated by Miguel

We argued that SREs should get involved and skill up on generative AI tools and techniques, instead of being naysayers and peanut gallerians.

readwise.io

lethain.com/pressure-wit... “Pressure itself is often useful, but pressure without a plan is chaos, unless your team has an internal leader who knows how to reshape that energy into pressure with a plan. Your aspiration as a leader should be to figure out how to become that internal leader.”

Pressure Without a Plan.

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 month to…

lethain.com

If everything is a priority, the corollary is that there is no priority. www.equityandentropy.com/p/to-do-more... “A priority is singular. It’s one thing before all others.”

To do more you have to do less

Priority is singular

equityandentropy.com

I like the reach of social networks. They allow me to share things that I read or think about, or photos I take with friends, family, but also people I don't know at all, and I hope that improves their lives just a little bit every day. On the other hand, as a dad with two young kids, I don't have

“Leaders who shine a light on what’s broken can look harsher from the outside. They talk openly about gaps. They surface issues before there’s a tidy solution. They resist wrapping everything in optimism. What’s easy to miss is that this posture usually comes from care.”

The Discipline of Seeing Clearly | annotated by Miguel

This is the second post in a short two part series about leadership and honesty.

readwise.io

The stoics, on the source of hate. ☝️

Legacy is code that works. Cleaning it up is necessary, but rarely trivial.

The Implementation Remembers - The Phoenix Architecture

Every mature system is carrying around lessons that were never written down. They’re encoded as validations, retries, timeouts, workflows, and exceptions. The implementation remembers. The…

aicoding.leaflet.pub

The Death and Rebirth of Programming - a future-looking article

The Death and Rebirth of Programming - The Phoenix Architecture

Programming didn't die all at once. There was no single moment, no dramatic obsolescence event. Instead, something quieter happened: the core constraint that shaped software for seventy years…

aicoding.leaflet.pub

Trees. Trees. Trees. They matter. Plant them. Protect them.

I’m happy to see Will Larson @lethain post again on engineering leadership. I agree with a lot of his article, but based on what we’re doing at Buffer, I will carefully disagree on a few things. Blog post to come.

Revised rules of engineering leadership.

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 that your mistakes reveal…

lethain.com

Often we prioritize work only on one of these axes: reach, impact, confidnce and effort. We must balance all of them to have the best possible outcome.

A DDoS is a black swan. A change you didn't think through is an unforced error. Only one of those is worth measuring. blog.migueldavid.eu/posts/unforc...

We just crossed 1 Million posts created through Buffer's API! 🎉 We built a live metrics page where you can watch it happen: time to first API call, clients created, ideas & posts created, & how people are using our MCP server across Claude, ChatGPT, & more. 🔗 Take a look: buffer.com/api-metrics

I really like Will Larsons writing and thinking. But this excerpt, logical when it was written, feels on its head with AI now. I see more engineers per manager, and broader engineers.

I wrote a new blog post! Emotions work like a pressure system. Pressure isn't the enemy, blockage is. Read how a burst pipe, my own anger, and software's "load shedding" taught me about releasing pressure before you snap.

The Pressure Valve - The writing outlet

Our emotions are like a water system inside our body (re: book “The Mountain is You”). Pleasant emotions flow. Unwanted emotions make you want to close that door. Like water,...

blog.migueldavid.eu

Folks ask me if I like living in Belgium. 🇧🇪 What I can say is that it’s transforming me. I’m becoming more of a liberal (in the economics sense) due to the ridiculously complex and overweight taxation system. I’m wearing t-shirts at 18C because June…

This one left me thinking. Is it because we connect with people and we have cold distance to products? Because we want more data points than just feedback with people? What do you think?

Be more independent, spend less time doing dependency upgrades work and worrying about where they will open up a security nightmare.

James@43081j.com · 2mo ago

the replacements.fyi site now lets you drop a package.json into it to see which dependencies can be replaced with native functionality, or more performant choices 🎉

Went to a gym (strength) class for the first time in years. Pray for me tomorrow 😂

The advice comes from real estate management, but applies to all roles really. The gap between now and your (daily/weekly/life) goal, is where your work should focus on.

What has @buffer to do with a medieval fair beyond my water cup 😂? Well, medieval fairs used to be the social media of the time. Times have changed. Now we also meet online, enter @buffer! In a couple of days we’ll announce something cool that enables everyone and their agents to share more ideas.

AI is eliminating the coordination tasks that justified non-technical engineering managers, while flattened orgs demand leaders who can provide immediate technical insights rather than just relay information. leaddev.com/career-devel...

As teams and orgs scale, so should conversations.

A great post by new EM colleague about how to help your manager help you. Excellent advice. Most of it I failed to do many times before 🙈

What your manager needs from you

How to help your manager help you

open.substack.com

If everyone can deploy code, who’s responsible for production? Read more: blog.incrementalforgetting.tech/p/when-every... #DevOps #SRE

When everyone ships code, who owns production?

The rise of the builder mindset and its implications for engineering teams

blog.incrementalforgetting.tech