My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I’ve suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I’m stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
Read more…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.
Read more…This is a blog post originally featured on the Better engineering blog. If you want to link to this article or share it, please go to the original post URL! Separately, I’m sorry it’s been so long with no posts on this blog. Between kids, moving, and being a startup CTO, I’ve been busy. I have a few posts coming down the pipe though, so stay tuned…
Read more…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.
Read more…When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more sense: they cost a bit more money to hire, but output usually more than compensates for it. Many fellow CTOs, some went for the other side of the spectrum. This was a mystery to me, until it all made sense to me.
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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
Read more…It started with a tweet:
New years resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates
— Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson) January 7, 2018
Why? Because I’ve been sitting in 100,000,000 meetings where people endlessly debate whether the monthly number of widgets is going up or down, or whether widget method X is more productive than widget method Y. For almost any graph, quantifying the uncertainty seems useful, so I started trying. A few months later:
Read more…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.
Read more…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.
Read more…As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I’m the author of Annoy, a library with 3,500+ stars on Github as of today. It offers fast approximate search for nearest neighbors with the additional benefit that you can load data super fast from disk using mmap. I built it at Spotify to use for music recommendations where it’s still used to power millions (maybe billions) of music recommendations every day.
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