Tanya Reilly (now at @[email protected])
@whereistanya
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Author, The Staff Engineer's Path: This account is announcements-only. I use Mastodon for socials:
Brooklyn
Joined June 2009
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#1
in computers and technology on the Kindle store. I'm pretty happy about that 🤩 If you bought the book, thank you very much!
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Ms 7 wanted to join a meeting and the meeting owner said sure, if she brought an agenda. So she came back with this.
It's fairly universal. Feel free to use it for your own meetings.
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I am never refreshing this tab.
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Don't solve problems with software that should be solved with talking.
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After several attempts to stop paying AWS 80c every month I spent an hour searching the console and finally found the stray service I hadn't deleted. And I was *sure* I had it this time until... I just got an AWS bill for 23c. This thing is the goddamn Hotel California.
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Hey, so, I've been a bit shy about announcing this, but I'm writing a book!
It's called the Staff Engineer's Path. It is, not surprisingly, about Staff Engineering! I'm really excited about it 🤩
Want to read some? The intro and first chapter are here:
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me, an infrastructure person, writing javascript
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I've been doing unix nerdery for 18 years and I just found out that dmesg -T will display human readable timestamps. OMG.
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From a slack I'm on. It's hours later and I'm still laughing.
(But seriously, industry, we need to fix this.)
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Oh wow, Stanford's CS106A and CS106B are back online for free. These courses changed my life a decade ago when unix-sysadmin-me decided it was time to go beyond scripting. Highly recommended if you're a not-really-coder who wants to be a coder.
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Your staff-plus engineers are your engineering culture. You get more of whatever you promote.
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I bought an electric bike and, in case you're wondering whether an electric bike is the best thing ever, I can confirm: it is the best thing ever. 🤩
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me: I'm envious of people who can just talk without tons of preparation. I have to decide in advance exactly what words I'm going to say or it comes out as a horrible mess.
@ckymnstr
: it's ok, you're a compiled language, not an interpreted language.
I feel so vindicated.
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"Pretty sure I understand the tradeoffs in distributed databases, but I'll read about consistency models and make sure it's solid."
Three hours pass.
"*gesturing wildly* Consistency is LIES! Causality is UNKNOWABLE. Time... time is a HALLUCINATION. ARE WE REAL? HELP ME 😱💀"
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Uh this is a bit braggy so please forgive me: I had a goal last year to write something that got published on paper, and now I have contributions in these three beautiful things. I feel really good about that.
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I'm writing about credibility. If someone says, say, “root cause” or “100% reliability”, they instantly lose credibility with reliability people.
What are the equivalents in other areas of software? What phrases make you assume someone doesn't know what they're talking about?
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The bot feature request is a good one. It's a slackbot that she and I keep adding features to, like you say "screambot pizza" and it says "Mmm 🍕" or whatever. So she wants it to do a reasonable response for nouns without us coding them.
I'll grab her some time with our ML team.
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This morning I talked to my kid's first grade class about the exciting job of: computer programmer.
me: who has questions?
little boy: it's a comment really...
Apparently it starts young. 😂😂😂
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SREs are architects, structural engineers and fire safety officers. We occasionally do controlled demolitions. If reliability engineers are fighting fires, things are going very wrong. Build fireproof software.
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Every single thing in tech is learnable. Most of it isn't that hard, it's just unfamiliar. Some of it is very hard, but that just means it takes longer to learn.
My favorite software eng fallacy is that if you haven’t done exactly some ‘thing’ you couldn’t learn it. B*tch, learning constantly is your literal job.
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A badass staff engineer told me this week that I was the first female principal engineer she'd ever met and that it was a big deal for her. It made me think back to
@kniga
becoming the first female principal engineer I'd ever met and how much that meant to me. Thanks, Anna.❤️
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I want every design document to have a section for "Here are the objections you should be having as you read this proposal. Here's why I still think we should take this path."
It's all tradeoffs.
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Lots of times you see someone discussing the nuances of some problem, and it's a bit intimidating. They're so smart! But you don't know that they've had like 200 hours of talking and thinking about the topic before they talked to you.
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I think people are sometimes afraid to be super opinionated in documents in case they're wrong. But wrong gets noticed and fixed. Vague sticks around until you discover that everyone meant different things and at least one of you just wasted a month.
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📢😴PAGERDUTY ALERT at 5am and I yelled HUH WHA? and knocked over my glass of water right into my power strip, then mashed buttons because I couldn't figure out how to stop a phone making sounds, then stumbled into the living room and turned on the fan instead of the light.
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me: yeah, I come from an SRE background
me: but I do other stuff now: infra, architecture, tech direction, starting to learn the product eng world
me: my SRE days are...
someone at our all hands: I have a question about incident response
me: GIVE ME THE MICROPHONE I HAVE OPINIONS
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Sometimes Repeat Yourself.
Context should drive this decision, says
@lucamezzalira
#OReillySACon
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I became a US citizen a few weeks ago and it's such a goddamn thrill to look up my poll site for early voting this week and see "Voter Status: Active". Damn right voter status is active.
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I like that thing where you don't know how to solve some code problem so you give it to your brain to crunch while you're asleep and next morning it tells you what you need to do. Batch processing.
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The ebook is now available!
It's on Kobo, Kindle, B&N, and Apple Books. I'd love to hear if you see it anywhere else.
Print version in a few weeks.
PS: The Staff Engineer's Path is going to the printer tomorrow. There are no emojis that quite capture my feelings about this fact, but it's sort of like 😱😅😭😬🤩😁😲😊🫣🫣🥺😁😱🎢 –except more so.
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This is the clearest SLI/SLO/SLA explanation I've seen so far. From
@elisabPDX
and
@mflaming
at SRECon Americas. I'm using this formulation to describe it from now on.
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coworker: the new system has more consistent response times. The old one was spiky, especially in the tail.
me: <loses the next few seconds of the meeting because I'm thinking about stegosaurs>
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The book is definitely not done, but every chapter has at least a name, an outline and a bunch of words in a file, and that feels *amazing*.
Probably some of the titles and outlines will change, but it's so... *book-shaped* 🤩
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My favourite tech twitter thing is when someone tweets that they got their first coding job or got a promotion and everyone else is delighted for them. A gazillion likes from complete strangers. I love that.
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TPMs* are amazing. It's like chaos just melts away.
*Technical Program Managers. The world's most competent people.
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me: three whole entire uninterrupted hours!
projectA: I'm lots of fun and it's been months.
projectB: I have a deadline. It's soon!
projectC: 2 hours and I'd be completely finished...
projectD: so new, so many ideas!
me: *frozen in indecision*
(Does this happen to anyone else?)
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"Mom"
"In a meeting"
"Mom! MOM!"
"Shhhh, almost done. 5 minutes"
"I have to tell you! It's really important!"
"(Sorry everyone) WHAT?"
"A blue whale's tongue is as heavy as an ELEPHANT"
"... uh, I need to drop off the call... " *whispering* "really? Do you have a picture...?"
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I should mention on here that I'm joining
@squarespace
SRE in four weeks as a principal engineer. Everyone I've met there is *lovely* and I'm so excited to join this amazing team.
And Friday was my last day at Google SRE after 12 years! I will miss you folks <3 <3
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PS: The Staff Engineer's Path is going to the printer tomorrow. There are no emojis that quite capture my feelings about this fact, but it's sort of like 😱😅😭😬🤩😁😲😊🫣🫣🥺😁😱🎢 –except more so.
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Stages of talk writing:
- abstract accepted
- why did I think this would work?
- oh god there's no narrative
- I hate this talk
- wait what if...
- no, still hate
- ok, it's talk-shaped but ugh <-- (I am here)
- obsessively tweak pictures
- rewrite until it makes sense
- ship it
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Hey, people who talk at things:
How long does it take you to put a new talk together? I need like 50 hours over at least a couple of months to make something I don't hate. I'm trying to get that down (maybe by not doing pictures?) but wondering what's normal for everyone else.
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A sessile oak (or Irish oak) grows slowly and lives a long, long time. When you plant one, you're thinking about future generations, not just yourself. It makes a whole ecosystem thrive around it.
I love them. So when I saw the cover art for The Staff Engineer's Path... 🌳😭❤️
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Chapters 2 and 3 of The Staff Engineer's Path are now online (in draft-y, unedited form).
Ch 2: Three Maps
Ch 3: Creating the Big Picture
If you have access to the O'Reilly platform, check out and marvel at my placeholder drawings!😆
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Hey, fellow north-folks: I don't mean to get in your business but it's October. If you use a light box to get through winter, you could start using it today instead of hauling it out of the attic in two weeks when you're already feeling miserable. Good luck. You've got this.♥️
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Process is hard.
no process: wasted time figuring out how to do things
guidelines: people treat it as law and want to document every edge case
clear process: pages of legalese; everyone hates it
And "use common sense here" turns out to be a very subjective thing.
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I made a touchscreen ui for my sonos a while back. Today:
"Can it show what the next song will be?"
"Sure, send me a pull request"
"Mommmm"
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✨ The Staff Engineer's Path is now available for pre-order from lots of places!
For example, it's at my favourite local bookshop:
Or (if you're in the US, UK or Spain) it's at your local bookshop via :
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However long you've been working, you get your 'senior female engineer' card the first time someone says you're 'aggressive' or 'abrasive'.
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There are few sentences scarier than "wait, did you accidentally run that against production?"
I *didn't* but wheewwwwww that took a year off my life.
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SRE culture used to be very whiskey-centric but now it's mostly about tea.
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If you write a lot of Google docs, is faster than clicking a lot of things. (This PSA inspired by two of my coworkers going "!!!" as they watched me do this.)
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Writing a talk for our interns full of practical life advice for surviving tech. Give me your best ways to politely say no to being volunteered for things.
I'll start: "Thanks for thinking of me, but I'm a terrible event planner. "
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Chapter 4 of the Staff Engineer's Path is now in early release at
It's about choosing which projects to work on.
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Love the meeting move where someone takes the floor just to smoothly hand it off to the person who was having trouble breaking in. You, sir, are a good person and deserve good things.
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After a day of writing and Twitter threads, here's where I've gotten to with career paths onwards from Staff+ roles.
Some of these headings just say "TODO", but ... it's progress! Writing is so much easier than outlining.
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me: 🎸
Ms 7: you made a mistake there
me: 💭o O { an opportunity for parenting! }
me: that's ok
me: if I don't make mistakes, I don't get better
me: mistakes are how I learn 😇😊
Ms 7: ...
Ms 7: I learn from National Geographic books
Ms 7: *goes back to coloring*
Damn.
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Today I'm writing about career paths onwards from Staff+ roles. If you did something interesting/unusual after a Staff+ role, I'd love to hear about it.
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I think I'm probably the last person on earth to realise this but just in case: if you turn on closed captioning in Google Meet your brain doesn't have to work as hard to follow the conversation and you can recover if you get distracted. It makes a *huge* difference for me.
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That was so reassuring. I found myself wishing they could just stay on stage and keep talking, really about anything, just hang out there being reasonable people who care about other people. "Tell us about trains, Joe. What do you like from the Acela dining car?"
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I needed to be told this and maybe you do too.
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I have made mistakes in my life but few as annoying as accidentally giving the Democrats my real email address.
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OK America, listen up:
The Eurovision is today. We'll need Twitter. Could you please not do anything fucking batshit for the next 8 hours?
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The Google SRE book defines toil as work that's "manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows".
I like how Tiarnan boils that down further. It's a useful way of categorising work.
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This is my first presidential election as a US citizen and voting felt pretty nice 😍 Good luck, us.
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Advent of code problems are good for recognising the algorithm you should be using, nodding respectfully towards it and then writing a filthy hack instead.
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2010-me: hey, future-me, what's up?
now-me: In 2018 there are lines for the bathrooms at tech conference
2010-me: ...
2010-me: do we transition? Because have to tell you, I didn't see that coming.
now-me: no! in the women's bathrooms! Lines!
2010-me: whoa!
now-me: I KNOW 😀
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"Delete almost all the words, attribute your images, and don't use Arial."
This is my first command on almost every slide deck I get asked to review. I should set up an autoresponder.
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Shout out to the SRE teams, traffic teams, incident commanders, capacity planners, and everyone else at
@nytopen
and other news sites today. Thank you for handling our obsessive reloads. ♥️
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Today's adventure is: websockets.
Writing a server in go took a few minutes. Now I'll just... create... a client... no big deal...
(I have no idea what I'm doing. It's the best.)
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ms 6, in the bath: *splash splash*
ms 6: *splash splash*
ms 6: ...
me: you alright in there?
ms 6: you always ask that
ms 6: like I'm going to say "no, a bear has entered the room"
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I got nine hours sleep last night and I didn't think it had any effect until I watched myself make a salad for dinner even though there's leftover pizza in the fridge.
Sleep is wild.
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Just realised I forgot to announce that
@skamille
wrote a freaking amazing foreword for my book! Thank you, Camille!🙏🙏🙏
This bit in particular is so insightful and true that I said "oof" out loud when I read it.
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What a principal engineer at Squarespace does all day, how to bring everyone around you up a level, and why you shouldn't ask me about train travel unless you've got time to spare. 😁
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You know when you start debugging something small and 4h later you're grepping the systemd code and it's like "how did my life go so wrong?"
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ms 8: mom, you're in your prime
me: ...thank you?
ms 8: but next year you'll be in your composite
me: I need to stop educating you
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American recipes are all "take an ounce of this first thing, a tablespoon of the second thing, 3/8 cup of the third thing, a quart and a half of the fourth thing, feel free to use half the amounts for a small batch".
It's been 12 years and I still can't.
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✅ aggressive/abrasive/difficult
✅ not technical enough/should change job ladders
Once you collect one from each category, you're at senior level, congratulations.
I've received feedback that I am "abrasive" and "difficult to work with", and even though no one can point to instances where I could do better, that feedback sticks with me.
Every time I enter a conversation, I wonder, "is this why they think I'm abrasive? Maybe add emoji 🤔😅"
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The great thing about being an adult is that when you finish your work and clean your house and do all your chores then you get to start on filing your taxes.
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😊🤗😍. Is it weird if I screenshot this tweet and put it on on my resume? (That would be weird, right?)
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I've been thinking today about this interview question I used to ask all the time. I'd describe an internal application that's been running for years on a developer's workstation. It's slowly become mission critical. The interview candidate needs to "make it reliable".
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Nine minutes left on call.
Nobody. Touch. Anything.
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@bluey
Thank you for asking! It's because it assumes there's one core reason for an outage, rather than a host of contributing factors. And it's often used to say "human error" was the root cause and stop looking further.
is a great read on the topic.
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Blog post: Staff engineer communities
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Cleaned out my work bag using the traditional method of turning it upside down and shaking it. Things that fell out include two pairs of socks, a Reese's peanut butter cup, two and a half crayons, a small tube of toothpaste and a potato.
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me: ready to leave the house
nyc: wait
me: ?
nyc: got you something
nyc: something you'll like 😊
me: ...
me: omg
me: is this one of the twenty days a year when it's not too hot or too cold to wear a blazer?
nyc: yes!😁
me: 😁
(I just really like spring.)
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ms 8: is that decaf?
me, bleary, gripping the paper cup with both hands: no
ms 8: caffeine makes you get anxiety
me: it's different in the morning... I mean...
ms 8, singing: 🎶 I'm going to drink coffee and be worried yay yay
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The hardest thing is saying no to something you don't really have time to do, but the best thing is having said no to something you don't really have time to do.
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Today, for the millionth time, I accidentally touched the part of my Macbook's touch bar that pops up Siri in front of the thing you're trying to do. Today, for the millionth time, I swore at it. And today, for the first time, I realised I could probably turn it off.
And I did.
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It's called bash as an abbreviation of the full name, "batshit".
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My first post on the Squarespace engineering blog!
Reviewing RFCs and why "yes if..." is way more useful than "no". Also, a celebration of my favourite two meetings of the week.😁
In the latest post on our Engineering blog, Tanya Reilly,
#Squarespace
's Principal Software Engineer, dives deep into our RFC (aka Design Document) process – from collaboration to the review process. Read on here:
#ThisIsSquarespace
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"If <person> is going to be in the meeting I don't need to be there" is my highest work compliment.
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Australia is everything I hoped it would be.
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Look, this house does not have many rules but WHEN SOMEONE SAYS "DUCKTALES" YOU SAY "WOO-OO".
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My kid made her teacher a card using stickers she found in my conference bag and I'm sure Ms Hicks is now wondering what a data dog is.
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My standing desk situation is getting ridiculous.
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"Code, why are you panicking?"
"Can't find a thing. It's fine. I'm ok."
"Self care first, code. Are you hydrated? Need a hug?"
"*sniff* yes"
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The final two chapters of The Staff Engineer's Path are now up on the O'Reilly learning platform. Ch8 is about intentional good influence through advice, teaching, guardrails and opportunity. And Ch9 is about paths onwards from a staff engineer role.
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I'm not certain, but I think this is the first *ever* conference specifically for staff+ folks? 😍
Check out the lineup! ✨
@blanquish
✨ & I are hosting, and we have some of the most wise and accomplished Staff+ folks in the industry joining us. (And a few badass managers too😁)
Leadership ≠ Management
There's more to leadership than people management.
Join us at
#StaffPlusLive
on September 14, as we explore how to be an effective senior individual contributor. Hosted by
@whereistanya
&
@blanquish
.
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