How we are transformed by the places where we work
Hi there, and welcome to another edition of Elezea! This is a newsletter focused on interesting and helpful reading about technology, software development, and internet culture. How we are transformed by the places where we workAlso how the Twitter meltdown shows us the power of microservice infrastructureI’m going to leave the minute-by-minute Twitter meltdown news in more capable hands like Platformer and Garbage Day (which I highly recommend subscribing to if you find this news cycle interesting). What I wanted to touch on here today is a specific aspect of it that I am particularly fascinated by: the seemingly small failures that might end up taking the whole system down. Right now there are lots of engineers who are “on call” for a bunch of Twitter systems that they didn’t work on. And if one of those systems go down and they get a page about it, not only do they not know how to fix it, there’s also, in many cases, no one left at the company who knows how to fix it (or they are to busy doing other things). So you get situations like this, as reported by Gergely Orosz: Scoop from within Twitter: small things are breaking, not enough engineers to fix them.
Noticed that notification counts are not showing? The BE service powering it is down since Thursday. A bug was filed, but the team that would fix it is full on with verification work. Also see that TikTok video about how a local dev instance is currently running in production. Chris Stokel-Walker has a more detailed summary of all of this in Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks:
But perhaps the most interesting part about all this is not that Twitter is dying, but that it is dying so slowly, thanks to breaking up the underlying technology in many different pieces (“microservices”) that can work independently: [1/4] One of the fascinating things is watching Twitter’s behavior change, hour after hour, as various microservices go offline. It’s a real testament to that approach that things mostly work as various features wink out of existence. So if—after the dust settles—more organizations prioritize breaking up their monoliths to move to microservices, I think we will at least be able to point to that as a silver lining… What I’m readingThis week’s “must-read” is Vicki Boykis’s The art of the long goodbye—a moving piece about layoffs, and how the companies we work at shape us:
I am hoping Vicki starts to write more frequently again, so make sure you subscribe to Normcore Tech to give her some extra encouragement! Cal Newport’s reflections On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition are really interesting, and talks about the fact that there is no one right way to get work done:
We don’t have to copy whatever the latest productivity hack is. Instead, we should identify how we react under different circumstances, and then deliberately design the environments in which we do our best work. I don’t really link to Lenny's Newsletter because I just assume that if you're subscribed here, you're already subscribed there. But just in case my assumption is wrong—if you're in Product / Marketing, please subscribe to Lenny Rachitsky. Always fantastic insights—such as in his latest post, How to determine your activation metric for Product-Led Growth:
→ For more on activation metrics (sometimes called “Time To Value”) and other measurements for Product-Led Growth, see 11 essential product metrics for measuring product-led growth. And finally this week, sticking to the Product-Led Growth theme, Emily Kramer of MKT1 has another great post called Building an efficient marketing machine: the fuel & the engine:
She goes into more detail in the post about what tactics are considered “fuel” vs. “engine”, and how to get the balance right in your organization. Some stray links
Alright friends, that’ll do it for today. I hope you have a peaceful weekend. And if you enjoyed this, could I ask you to share it with someone you like? That would be really cool. 💛 |
Key phrases
Older messages
Visionaries vs. Integrators: a crucial distinction in work relationships
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
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Wednesday, November 2, 2022
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Monday, July 18, 2022
Finding clarity of purpose, impactful questions to ask yourself as a manager, and developing healthier communication patterns in your team,
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Our ever-expanding jobs, minimum viable process, and coordination challenges in large organizations.
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