writing
Thoughts on engineering leadership, distributed systems, architecture, and the craft of building software.
192 essays and counting
2020: The Year Everything Changed
A year that began with a mysterious virus in Wuhan ended with the world permanently altered, and the acceleration of trends that will define the next decade
re:Invent 2020: Virtual, Massive, and ECS Anywhere
AWS re:Invent went fully virtual and announced ECS Anywhere, extending container orchestration beyond the cloud and into any infrastructure you operate
Apple M1: ARM Beats x86
Apple is about to ship ARM-based Macs, and if the rumors are right, this will be the most significant architectural shift in personal computing since the move from PowerPC
The US Election and Social Media's Reckoning
The 2020 US election exposed the fundamental tension between platform scale and platform responsibility, and there are no easy answers
Terraform 0.13: Provider Requirements Done Right
Terraform 0.13 introduces proper provider source addresses and module-level provider requirements, fixing one of the most persistent pain points in infrastructure as code
Kubernetes 1.19: The Platform Is Mature
Kubernetes 1.19 extends the support window to one year and moves Ingress to GA, signaling that the platform has crossed from innovation to infrastructure
Tesla Model Y: My Third Tesla
Taking delivery of a Model Y and reflecting on how Tesla went from a curiosity to the default choice for anyone paying attention to the automotive industry
GPT-3: AI Can Write
OpenAI's GPT-3 paper demonstrates that scaling a language model to 175 billion parameters produces something qualitatively different from what came before
The World Went Remote Overnight
COVID-19 just forced the largest remote work experiment in human history, and cloud infrastructure is the only reason it is working at all
A Virus in Wuhan: How Technology Responds
Reports of a novel coronavirus are emerging from China, and the tech response is already revealing how the world handles crises differently in 2020