Over the years, a number of people have asked about the details surrounding Etsy’s architecture review process. In this post, I’d like to focus on the architecture review working group’s role in facilitating dialogue about technology decision-making. Part of this is really just about working groups in general (pros, cons, formats, etc.) and another part...
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I’m reading a book that was suggested to me by the Director of the Office of Learning in the US Forest Service as “required reading” for any modern organization that intends to learn – Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together As a teaser, William Isaacs makes a very good case for considering discussion to be seen as...
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I’m going to post the contents of a gist I wrote (2 years ago?!), because Theo is right, some gists are better as posts. The context for this was a debate on Twitter (which, as always, is about as elegant and pleasing to read as a turtle trying to breakdance). Summing up contextual influence on systems architecture...
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(this is also posted on O’Reilly’s Radar blog. Much thanks to Daniel Schauenberg, Morgan Evans, and Steven Shorrock for feedback on this) Before I begin this post, let me say that this is intended to be a critique of the Five Whys method, not a criticism of the people who are in favor of using...
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I’m a firm believer in restating values, goals, and perspectives at the beginning of every group debriefing (e.g. “postmortem meetings”) in order to bring new folks up to speed on how we view the process and what the purpose of the debriefing is. When I came upon a similar baselining dialogue from another domain, I...
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(This was originally posted on Code As Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog. I’m re-posting it here because it still resonates strongly as I prepare to teach a ‘postmortem facilitator’s course internally at Etsy.) Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought...
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UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of sponsorship. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t...
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While searching around for something else, I came across this note I sent in late 2009 to the executive leadership of Yahoo’s Engineering organization. This was when I was leaving Flickr to work at Etsy. My intent on sending it was to be open to the rest of Yahoo about what how things worked at...
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Ben Rockwood said something last December about the re-emergence of the Systems Engineer and I agree with him, 100%. To add to that, I’d like to quote the excellent NASA Systems Engineering handbook’s introduction. The emphasis is mine: Systems engineering is a methodical, disciplined approach for the design, realization, technical management, operations, and retirement of...
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This little ramble of thoughts are related to my talk at Velocity coming up, but I know I’ll never get to this part at the conference, so I figured I’d post about it here. Building resilience from a systems point of view means (amongst other things) understanding how your organization deals with failure and unexpected...
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