lethain (u/lethain) - Readit News

lethain commented on Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you? · Posted by u/_ajoj

lethain · 3 years ago

I've been blogging for about 16 years. Writing is an underrated way to cement what you learn any given day or year, and over time has made it possible to reach into any part of the industry and get an actual response. Writing is particularly powerful in combination with actually doing things that (are perceived to) matter; the credibility from doing both is much higher than doing either.

Concretely answering the questions asked:

1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and the changes are for fun, not necessity

2. I got my first job in tech thanks to blogging: https://lethain.com/datahub/

3. My blogging has made it possible to write two pretty successful books: https://staffeng.com/book/ and https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle (working on a third now)

4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing :-)

5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting their colleague to the writer or whatnot

lethain commented on How the Digg team was acquihired lethain.com//digg-acquihi... · Posted by u/stuartmemo

sys_64738 · 6 years ago

Digg is a classic example of a webpage getting a working model right, totally by accident. This happens quite a lot in that they cobble something together and it got trajectory. Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem. They had no clue and they changed it causing the whole thing to crater.

The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.

lethain · 6 years ago

In my role as unofficial, self-appointed late-stage Digg historian [0], it's my belief that Digg ultimately had to change as the Google SEO changes had fatally wounded its near-profitability. Further, as a VC funded company it made the inevitable (and I think best for everyone involved) decision to modernize in an attempt to be a member of the Facebook, Twitter cohort rather than experience a long-term shrinking into mediocrity.

[0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

lethain commented on How the Digg team was acquihired lethain.com//digg-acquihi... · Posted by u/stuartmemo

mtmail · 6 years ago

> our starting point was far less: 200 DAU.

Digg currently, or recently, was down to 200 daily active users? I knew they lost a lot of users but that sounds like they lost everybody.

lethain · 6 years ago

Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is that we had 200 daily active Facebook uniques, essentially that very few folks used FB to connect to Digg.

lethain commented on Root cause analysis: significantly elevated error rates on 2019‑07‑10 stripe.com/rcas/2019-07-1... · Posted by u/gr2020

aeyes · 7 years ago

You might want to clarify this in the post. To me it reads like you knowingly had degraded infra for days leading up to an incident which might have been preventable had you recovered this instances.

lethain · 7 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, we’re adding a clarifying note to the report’s timeline.

lethain commented on Root cause analysis: significantly elevated error rates on 2019‑07‑10 stripe.com/rcas/2019-07-1... · Posted by u/gr2020

laCour · 7 years ago

"[Four days prior to the incident] Two nodes became stalled for yet-to-be-determined reasons."

How did they not catch this? It's super surprising to me that they wouldn't have monitors for this.

lethain · 7 years ago

(Stripe infra lead here)

This was a focus in our after-action review. The nodes responded as healthy to active checks, while silently dropping updates on their replication lag, together this created the impression of a healthy node. The missing bit was verifying the absence of lag updates. (Which we have now.)

lethain commented on Developing Erlang at Yahoo (2008) [pdf] cufp.galois.com/2008/slid... · Posted by u/cpeterso

lethain · 10 years ago

It's fun to see that deck since my first (software) job out college was working with that team (about a year after this slide), when only two of those four mentioned individuals remained on the team, but consequently I got the pretty rare/fun opportunity to write Erlang.

We had a major advantage for new technology rollout as we did "devops" (e.g. the ops team decided they did not have bandwidth to support us and we needed to launch), and were building greenfield technology (Y! BOSS) with relatively few integration points with existing Y! technology (except for Vespa which is similar to SOLR/ElasticSearch and some weird C++ libraries that were somehow mislabeled from "junky prototype" to "high technology" and were ported forward).

Years later, my sense is that the biggest initial stumbling block was getting the existing devs to have any interest in learning a new technology / way of doing things. I think we lacked some perspective there, and should have made a much larger effort to get the team excited and trained with the technology (in jobs since, I've never had a team who turns down technology training), and could have probably won our local team over if we'd been more intentional.

Ultimately though, the final stumbling block was Y! itself, which was very focused on keeping the number/diversity of technologies low. I think at the organizational level this is probably the right decision, so I can't really fault them for that. Ironically Node.js popped up just a year or so later as the great language hope to rescue Y!, and did manage to get significant traction, so if you wanted to study adoption, finding someone who could explain how they got Y!'s Node.js adoption going in the right direction would be pretty fascination.

lethain commented on Tech layoffs more than double in Bay Area mercurynews.com/business/... · Posted by u/akg_67

20years · 10 years ago

Can any of you from the Bay Area comment on if you have found it harder to find jobs lately? Are recruiters reaching out less than they did last year?

I would be interested in hearing from some of you that have been laid off. Have you found another job in the Bay Area or did you have to leave?

lethain · 10 years ago

As a hiring manager in SF, my anecdotal experience is that most large companies are still hiring at the same pace they were a year ago, but that capital and subsequently hiring has dried up for smaller companies.

For experienced developers/managers, things seem to be business as usual, but in particular the "top tier" companies generally are more focused on avoiding false positives than in reducing false negatives, so I see us as entering a slightly unpleasant period for non-traditional and entry-level candidates.