No one asked for this, but I’m something like ~12 years into my career and have had my fair share of mistakes and luck so I thought I’d share some.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve mostly benefitted from luck. Some of the things I did on a whim turned out to be excellent choices many years later. Some of the things were clear blind spots in hindsight. If I could give my 12 years younger self a bunch of career advice, here are some of those things.

Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It’s hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something. One pet theory I’ve had for a really long time, is that some of this is really just a statistical artifact.

A modern tech stack typically involves at least a frontend and backend but relatively quickly also grows to include a data platform. This typically grows out of the need for ad-hoc analysis and reporting but possibly evolves into a whole oil refinery of cronjobs, dashboards, bulk data copying, and much more. What generally pushes things into the data platform is (generally) that a number of things are

It started with a tweet:

This is a bit of a rant but I really don’t like software that invents its own query language. There’s a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up.

I get bored reading management books very easily and lately I’ve been reading about a wide range of almost arbitrary topics. One of the lenses I tend to read through is to see different management styles in different environments.

Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:

1. I really struggle with the term microservices. I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it’s gotten picked up by the hype train. Whatever. But I have to stick to some type of terminology so let’s just roll with it.
2. This blog post might be mildly controversial, but I’m throwing it out there because I’ve had this itchy feeling for so long and I can’t get rid of it. I respect it if you want to disagree vehemently, and maybe there’s something both of us can learn.
3. I have a weird story. My first “real” company, Spotify, used a service-oriented architecture from scratch. I also spent some time at Google which used a service-oriented architecture. So basically since 2006 I’ve been continuously working in what people now call a “microservice architecture”. It didn’t even occur to me that some people might want to build things as monoliths. So I guess I’m coming at it from a different direction than many other. Either way, there were particular non-standard reasons why Spotify and Google had to do this that I’ll get back to later.

Let’s start by talking about iteration speed!