pragmatist

What I Read in 2024

Looking back, I noticed a couple of themes in my reading this year. One was biographies of people who had achieved success and then figured out how to change so that the drive that propelled their success didn’t eat them from the inside (Becoming Steve Jobs, Pep Guardiola)

Another theme was books that prompted some reflection that I would read (or listen to) in the morning as I got the kids ready for school (What We Owe The Future, Not The End Of The World, A Decent Life)

And then there is my normal mix of trying to better understand the world and pick up additional tools for functioning in it (The Laws of Trading, Thinking in Systems, Sludge, Noise, Stories that Stick). I’m happy with those books if I take away one mental model or skill that I can use.

What I Read in 2023

I read 18 books in 2023. Including 5 in Spanish. Here they are.

Monitor For The Absence Of Success, Not Just the Presence of Failures

Let’s start with a brief story: last year one of my teams built a new system that was in a limited beta. The system was dependent on receiving messages from an upstream system owned by a different team in an entirely different part of the company. It processed those messages, using them to display something to customers that had a meaningful positive impact on purchase conversion for the small number of merchants that were using the new feature.

After an intense and successful Black Friday / Cyber Monday period, most of the team was looking forward to taking a well-earned rest around the end of the year. We were confident that our on-call rotations and monitoring would let people mostly unplug and recharge, while knowing that if anything went wrong, we’d know about it.

Unfortunately, when we came back from a week off, we realized that the buyer-facing feature had essentially been disabled for a week and we didn’t know.

What I Read in 2022

I read 18 books in 2022. Including 4 in Spanish. Here they are.

A Brief Morality Play About A Cool, User Friendly Feature

I saw a feature request from my friend and former colleague Ellen Beldner last night on Twitter:

i simply want a protocol that embeds password requirements into the form field html and that password managers can use to create a matching PW

What follows is a running diary of my thoughts for the next five minutes where I:

1. Get super excited about her idea
2. Figure out how it could work technically with current standards
3. Realize why it wouldn’t do much good in the real world