Five for Friday – May 5, 2023
Kind of a weird week. I left sunny and hot Seattle to visit Los Angeles for a few days – where it was cloudy and rainy. And now that I’m back in Seattle, it’s cloudy and rainy here too. At least the new Guardians movie is out so there’s something good to do indoors. Meanwhile – here are a few links to things I found this week that I thought were interesting.
- I was bummed to read that Unity went through another round of layoffs. I don’t have insights into much on this one (and too much on the last one), but I hope my old colleagues are all doing well. It’s tough for a company to do three rounds of layoffs in a year.
- Speaking of corporate ugliness, I just gave Orbiting the Giant Hairball a re-read. It is THE book, in my opinion for putting some sense into navigating the workplace when the workplace feels like a giant hairball.
- I liked (and cringed at?) this article on a Tale of Two Interviews. Nothing destroys me more than giving a candidate a bad experience. Hiring teams need to do better.
- This is interesting – Amazon Prime moved from Serverless to EC2 and ECS to Save Costs. This quote is something I think more development teams need to notice:
“We realized that distributed approach wasn’t bringing a lot of benefits in our specific use case, so we packed all of the components into a single process.“ - I’ve been a happy customer of Underground Cellar for several years. It was a great place to get highly drinkable wine at a reasonable price – PLUS, they’d store your wine for you until you wanted it. It was a great idea, of course, until they abruptly went out of business. Now they have several cases of wine that I’m likely never going to see again.
And on that note, I’m going to sign off from this blog post and get back to my day job. Have a good weekend.