I recently read Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. It was good! You should read it. I want to say this up front, since after some preamble I’m going to describe a Rube-Goldbergian attempt to poke petty holes in it. I don’t want the reader to lose sight of the big picture, which is that I was trying to do this in the spirit of the book. Which...
There were rumblings earlier this week that Alphabet executives mused about killing GCP. I think they probably won’t do it [1]. But as a side effect this has provoked yet another round of everyone pouring one out for the most beloved Google ex-feature ever, Google Reader. I miss the RSS world of the early 2000’s as much as anyone. I miss it...
Here are some links to recent work I’ve done elsewhere. Ship Small Diffs - I tried to transmute the anguish I feel looking at huge changesets into words. Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself - Getting youngfolk to listen to you is harder than I realized. Fourteen Months with Clojure - Going back to my Lisp roots here. The...
Coda and I have been using Clojure to build Skyliner for the last fourteen months or so. I thought it might be a good idea to write down some of our experiences with this, for the benefit of others considering it for practical work. The beating heart of Skyliner, a deploy encoded as a finite state machine. Learning languages is easy,...
I’ve worked with deploy systems in the past that have a prominent “rollback” button, or a console incantation with the same effect. The presence of one of these is reassuring, in that you can imagine that if something goes wrong you can quickly get back to safety by undoing your last change. But the rollback button is a lie. You can’t have a...
Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity. Toolchains for building code in general are widely available, relatively older, and they also happen to be closest at hand when you’re getting started. The tendency, then, is to pick some command line tools and work forwards from their affordances. Git provides methods for...
Note: This was a post for Skyliner, which was a startup I co-founded in 2016. The post is recreated here since it makes some good points and was reasonably popular. But be advised the startup it describes is now defunct (we sold ourselves to Mailchimp in 2017). I’ve been around long enough to see production releases done a few different ways. My...
I was speaking on a panel the other day that was handed the topic, “the challenges of balancing data-light product bets vs purely data driven incremental improvements.” Camille Fournier was also a panelist and wrote up her thoughts here. Camille’s take (which I think is right) is that even if you don’t have data to work from, you can still...
Please note that Roberto Medri is a coauthor on this post. Albert Wenger has been one of the VC’s I most admire for a long time. He was very present in the early days at Etsy, and sat in giving counsel on some, uh, significantly astray engineering team meetings. Albert is a smart, data-driven guy whose values roughly align with my own. That...
In response to Kellan’s musing about push notifications on twitter, Adam McCue asked an interesting question: @kellan @mcfunley what's the best way to do this?— Adam McCue (@mccue) November 25, 2015 I quickly realized that fitting an answer into tweets was hopeless, so here’s a stab at it in longform. How would we do this? Let’s come up with a...
I gave a spoken word version of Choose Boring Technology at OSCON in Portland last week. Here are the slides: $('#choose-boring-technology-deck').speakerdeck();
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become the engineer that wrote Data...
Here’s a video of me doing a slightly-amended version of my Data Driven Products talk at the Lean Startup Conference back in December. I am told I upspeak? You be the judge.
I saw lizTheDeveloper’s post about technical leadership at Simple and I realized that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. I hope to persuade you that there are a number of systemic biases working against a healthy technical career path. I don’t think that they’re insurmountable, and I don’t disagree with Liz’s post. But I’ve never...
Back when I was at Etsy, I did a presentation internally about the craft of sizing opportunities. I finally got around to writing a public incarnation of that talk. Here it is: $('#data-driven-products-now-deck').speakerdeck();
The person on build rotation, or the nightly schlimazel I suppose, went into a hot 5’x8’ closet containing an ancient computer. This happened after everyone else had left, so around 8:30PM. Although in crunch time that was more like 11:30PM. And we were in crunch time at one point for a stretch of a year and a half. “That release left a mark,” my...
Here’s a presentation I gave about how Etsy wound up using Scalding for analysis. Given at the San Francisco Cascading Meetup. $('#scalding-at-etsy-deck').speakerdeck();
For four months ending in early 2011, I worked on team of six to redesign Etsy’s homepage. I don’t want to overstate the weight of this in the grand scheme of things, but hopes flew high. The new version was to look something like this: There were a number of methodological problems with this, one of our very first web experiments. Our...
Here’s an interview I did with Growth Hacker TV last week. We covered many topics: What exactly were you smoking when you made experimentcalculator.com? How did Etsy get started running experiments? Do you really hate bandit testing? Do you really think performance never matters? Do you really hate real time analytics? Check it out, for...
It’s old news by now, but a few months back I was on the cover of Network World along with my colleagues Nellwyn, Steve, and Dottie. If you missed it when it came out, you can read the article here.