Five for Friday – July 12, 2019

It’s smack in the middle of summer in Seattle – which means it rained most of the week. Here’s what I read while watching the clouds.

  • Cindy Sridharan is back with another fantastic blog post – this time on Distributed Tracing
  • There are few things I loathe more than a status meeting. Here’s an article on how Jeff Bezos (supposedly) fixed that problem with his (brilliant) memo system
  • Yet-another-great-article on why Generalizing is better than Specializing. I could rant, but I won’t
  • I’m still working my way through Trillion Dollar Coach, and it’s still fantastic. Some quotes just sing out to me.
    Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.
  • For the locals (or the visitors), two of my colleagues and I went out for a day last weekend with Seattle Mountain Bike Tours, and it was fantastic and worth every penny. I especially recommend it to visitors, because it will partially explain why I love living in the Seattle area so much.

Similar Posts

  • Let it happen

    I come across this frequently enough that I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before, but context dictates that I do it again. The story I hear goes pretty much like this: My team really needs to improve X, but nobody is taking responsibility for it. The fix is obvious – we need our exec /…

  • My End at Microsoft

    It’s been exactly a year now since I left Microsoft (and a week away from my one-year anniversary at Unity). I (abstractly) dumped my feelings on the move a year ago in The Breakup, and posted a few thoughts and reflections in my first few months at Unity (Forty Days In, Why Unity, Musings on…

  • Network and influence

    I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new…

  • Five for Friday – November 18, 2022

    Time is a blur. I know today is Friday, because todoist reminded me to post a FfF post – something I recently realized I’ve done for over 5 years now. That’s like….math…a bunch of links. Hopefully you found a few of these helpful, interesting, or worth reading. Here’s this week’s batch. That’s all for this…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.