#engineering

The surest way to ruin an engineering team is to believe it will survive whatever you do to it.

During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were raised on jackscrews. The work was funded by both private property owners and public funds.

The framework was pretty helpful for us as a team to optimize (or “force multiply” as we say in the Amazon Principal Tenets) the impact of our super awesome Principal Engineer community. We used the role framework to assess Principal Engineer engagement for our most important projects across Amazon S3/Glacier. In some cases, we changed the role of the Principal Engineer.

It shouldn’t be a radical act because results are better if we can cooperate. And life is better without cult leaders. How do we tear down parochialism and ego?

The Zenith Space Command, one of the first wireless television remotes ever to exist, is a monument to a time before we took the remote for granted. It also just so happened to contain one of the most influential and intriguing buttons in history.

My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

most (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isn’t so much “what?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE.” and more “wait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way that’s sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?“

most (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isn’t so much “what?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE.” and more “wait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way that’s sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?“

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.

"it's just a guide that will help you get your engineering up quick"

I think Schpooki needs to learn engineering :)

"Lewin Edwards presents five engineering tips that are crucially important to successful product engineering, but which are rarely brought up in discussions of engineering practices."

"In 50 years time, when today's 12 year olds are writing their biographical sketches of how they got into electronics or mechanics or computing, how will they describe their childhood learning experiences?"