Category: engineer
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The right way to say goodbye
Today a fellow Yahoo! engineer ping’ed me on IM and asked to shoot some 9-ball. While we were playing, he mentioned that he was leaving in 2 days for the greener pasture of smaller startups. While I was still taking in the news, I finished shooting in the first 7 balls straight and was about…
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Hiring For The Team
Image is from Kontra coffee in Copenhagen with my reflection, they are showing off their World Barista Championship trophies hiring the right engineers has always been a challenge. Do you hiring the best technical person but his personality may not fit well in the team? Do you hire someone who can learn quickly but is…
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Everything Will Fail
Lesson of the day for engineers. Whatever large system you design, some component of it will fail one day. It’s a valuable exercise to draw a diagram of every system, machine, load balancer, DNS servers and start drawing a big X on each component and ask yourself what happens when that component fails. 1) What…
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Context Switching
It’s a term I first learned 15 years ago in my computer OS class. Multitasking operating systems execute different programs ‘in parallel’ by giving each a little bit of time to execute. Because the CPU was fast enough, it appeared that every program was running at the same time. Now back to real work and…
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PHP Coding While Thinking Of Food
I was writing some PHP code while a co-worker from Florida was chatting with me about Munich and how perfect of a city it was. I was intending to write function addTopicSet() But I ended up typing function addGoodSeafood() Damn Lucas
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focus, execute, kick ass
When I was interviewing new engineers for Yahoo! News back in late 2004. I told them that they will part of a team that can make a difference. The team is small enough and our site audience is large enough (25 million) that they can contribute as much as they have the time and energy…
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Poll: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?
I’m mostly referring to obsessiveness about cleaning your house. I know I am obsessive since I was really antsy all day, the moment Kate went down for bed at 8:00pm I started cleaning until 1:00am. Putting all her toys away, doing 3 loads of laundry, wiping along all the edges of the floor moldings, scrubbing…
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What Makes A Great Engineering Team
The best team I ever worked in was the Electronic Services Group in SGI from 1995 to 1999. We built X11 Motif tools installed on every IRIX OS machine to search and apply patches automatically, log support calls over the internet, get hardware configurations and send back registration information. The tools were build on ontop…
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What Motivates You At Work?
I am motivated by fear. Fear of failure, fear of not knowing, fear of dissapointing those around me. How about you?
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What Type Of Investor Are You?
Well we all knew this would happen. Google eventually would miss their quarterly numbers like all fast growing companies. For those of you who always lament that you didn’t buy Google when it was $200 or $300, this is your chance to test whether you are a real investor or just one of the sheep…