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.

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