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Book Reviews

You Don’t Deserve a House in the Bay Area

You Don’t Deserve a House in the Bay Area

Time to check-in on the Bay Area housing crisis in 2016. ... Yep, still as bad as ever. The latest controversy is that, contrary to silly ideas back in 2015 that two working professionals could afford to own a home…

The Folly of Stack Ranking and Measuring Impact

The Folly of Stack Ranking and Measuring Impact

Recently I came across a brief statement on Facebook about the well-explained evils of stack ranking, with a half-hearted Devil’s Advocate argument about how impact can absolutely be an objective metric, measured and ranked[1]. I still…

Effective Communication Requires Traffic Engineering

Effective Communication Requires Traffic Engineering

Solving communication with clever tooling is akin to buying into a get-rich-quick scheme. I’d like to think most of us recognize that good communication in itself is hard , but I do think a lot of us want…

A Fancy European Road Trip

A Fancy European Road Trip

My wife and I just got back from a week-long vacation in picturesque Scandinavia. To be honest, it was not one of the destinations either of us ever had on our list of places to list, especially during the…

Data Sync Not Invented Here

Data Sync Not Invented Here

You’d think that data syncing is a solved problem for applications. Dropbox has been around for close to 10 years , and they came up with a product model — a local folder whose files (usually) silently merge with upstream servers…

Transitioning to Management is Trial by Fire

Transitioning to Management is Trial by Fire

A couple months back, I wrote about how promotions typically work inside of midsized to large companies. In short, they’re usually descriptive in nature, so the individual only gets the new level and title after they’re essentially doing…