2020 a Year in Review

Even writing this feels weird, but so many of the year’s rituals have been up-ended or discarded, that it seemed necessary to continue with one that I can easily do on my own, so here we go. 2020 presented a lot of challenges, however I was incredibly fortunate and privileged to have been able to…More

Recommended Engineering Management Books

Over the past 3.5 years my career has grown and transformed from Individual Contributor (IC) to an Engineering Manager of multiple teams, and all the roles in between as I built the Azure Sphere Security Services (AS3) Team from 2 people to 20 people. I undertook this journey in the Summer of 2017 to help transform a Microsoft Research project, Project Sopris, into a Generally Available (GA) product Azure Sphere.

Below is my curated list of the most influential and impactful books that helped me along the way, and that I highly recommend to Engineering Managers
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Design Docs, Markdown, and Git

About a year ago my software engineering team, the Azure Sphere Security Services (AS3) team, found ourselves struggling with our design document process.  So we ran an experiment, moving all our design documents to be written in Markdown, checked into Git, and reviewed via a pull request (PR). The experiment has been incredibly successful, so…More

2019 A Year In Review

My last blog post talked about 2017 being a year of change.  2018 and 2019 have been ones of intense growth and discovery.  It’s felt like a whirlwind, so let’s catch up on the basics.  Home I’m still living in and loving Seattle.  Moving back here proves over and over again to be the right…More

2017 a Year in Review

2017 was a year of change, personal and professional.  I started the year in San Francisco, working at Twitter as an Individual Contributor, and in a long term relationship.  I ended the year in Seattle, working at Microsoft Research as a Lead, sans that long term relationship, and a brand new home owner.   Change…More

Resources for Getting Started with Distributed Systems

I’m often asked how to get started with Distributed Systems, so this post documents my path and some of the resources I found most helpful.  It is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list. It is worth noting that I am not classically trained in Distributed Systems.  I am mostly self taught via…More

2016: A Year in Review

2016 was a year of constant movement, I visited 19 cities, in 7 countries, on 3 continents.  In the middle of the year I switched teams inside of Twitter and began working on a new challenge, Distributed Build.  I also spoke 15 times at conferences and meetups.  Its been a really long, wonderful and exhausting…More

Tech WCW #4 – Jean Jennings Bartik

On February 14th 1946 the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was unveiled to the public.  It was the first general purpose electronic digital computer and it was Turing Complete.  The project was funded by the United States Military to speed up mathematical tasks, most notably artillery firing tables for the Army for World War…More

A Quick Guide to Testing in Golang

When I started writing Go in May, I found a lot of useful documentation on Getting Started with Go.  However, I found recommendations on testing best practices lacking.  So I decided to write down what I pieced together, and create a Github Repo of a base project with examples.  Essentially this is the guide I…More

2015: A Year in Review

2015 has been a whirlwind of a year, which started off in a new city, with a new job as the Tech Lead of  Observability at Twitter.  The year was full of travel spanning 10 states, 3 different countries, and 2 continents.  This year I also had numerous opportunities to share my experiences with programming…More