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New year, new blog
Ok, the last time I updated my blog I went full geek with the static site generator pages hosted on Github pages. This is a great approach for a blog that you never update! But I tired of the friction of having to remember exactly how to create new posts, and wondering if the publishing…
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Technical debt
I have had the great fortune of starting a few companies and products from scratch. These were true mythic green field opportunities – not a line of code existed when we started. For most companies, however, and most developers, there is some legacy of code written some time in the past. And some of this code may…
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Trust
Over the years I have come to appreciate how trust is the key ingredient to any effective engineering organization. The presence of trust enables all sort of things to magically happen, while its absence can torpedo almost any effort. Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage places trust as the base principle amongst five that he identifies as the…
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AWS is a 1000 piece lego kit
I’ve been spending time lately trying to get a deeper understanding of the current world of AWS. That platform grows and changes so quickly that it takes real effort just to keep up! The breadth of AWS is pretty incredible: Just wrapping your head around all these services is a challenge. Then trying to build…
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Competition vs. collaboration culture
(Update: Sarah Mei posted a great tweetstorm about how to deliver effective criticism. Very relevant to this topic.) One of the enduring management challenges in any engineering group is finding the balance between competition culture and collaboration culture. Competition culture is represented by what I think of as the “classic” (or “deplorable”) engineer style: combative, arrogant, and always needing to…
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Blog migration
I described here how I’ve decided to move my blog (back) to WordPress for 2023. My old blog is still up at https://scottp.org – hosted on Github pages. Just to get things seeded I copied over the last few posts to the new blog here. And obviously I back-dated this post just so it shows…