Learn to leverage Python patterns like a professional.
best-practices
Superhuman became known for its unique approach to onboarding: a highly-personalized, white-glove, human-led experience. Superhuman's Gaurav Vohra, startup advisor and growth leader, gives us a detailed look at how he built and scaled the program.
Google’s Engineering Practices documentation
What are the principles we can use to build LLM-powered software that is actually good enough to put in the hands of production customers? - humanlayer/12-factor-agents
Levels founder & CEO Sam Corcos shares his detailed time-tracking data across 5 years of startup growth
People have different styles when they cook. Some people are neat and tidy. After taking out and using an ingredient they don’t need anymore, they return it to the fridge or cabinet. After chopping up vegetables, they clean up the scraps left behind. When a dish has been dirtied, they put it in the sink. […]
A short introduction to Interval Tree Clocks, a causality tracking mechanism, based on a lightening talk I gave at dotScale 2017.
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
Books in Progress is what we call a “public drafting tool”: Drafts will be made available for comment from the public, allowing for direct collaboration between author and reader.
The authoritative guide on how Amazon does WBRs (from former exec Colin Bryar): how it works, how to do it, and how Amazon uses it to win.
People often say things like "become data driven" without explaining what that means or how to do it. This is everything you need to know to actually become data driven, from scratch, using the same first principles that Amazon, Koch, and Toyota used back in their day.
Create your first run chart and start interpreting your data using just four rules. Your go-to QI resource.
How Danaher combines Lean manufacturing with masterful capital allocation to build a remarkable manufacturing company in the United States.
Continuous Improvement sounds simple, even obvious. And yet there's a profound secret at its heart that doesn't seem to get talked about.
Assortment of technology startup infrastructure recommendations
In 1951, Bell Telephone System introduced a guide titled "The Telephone and How We Use It," designed to aid elementary school students and others in understanding the operation of classic rotary dial phones. The guide detailed everything from basic phone use, handling emergencies, to polite phone ma
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is a nonfiction book by professors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. It was first published on May 18, 2021. The book concerns 'noise' in human judgment and decision-making. The authors define noise in human judgment as "undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem" and focus on the statistical properties and psychological perspectives of the issue.
Two principles on collecting data, from the field of Statistical Process Control. As with most principles in SPC, this is both simpler and more important than you might think.
Or "that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it like a week after launch"
I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than three decades.
Time to define tooltips and share best practices. Explore tooltip types and its examples in our blog post coming from a prototyping tool.
Large customers require engineers to build several acronyms
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.
DORA is a long running research program that seeks to understand the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance. DORA helps teams apply those capabilities, leading to better organizational performance.
be as specific as possible. “agi takeoff fast”: define “agi” “takeoff” “fast” there’s no such thing as a coincidence for decisions: autoresolve (1) on specific date (2) to the scary one let people tell you no. don’t make the decision for them. if you’re ever confused about what to do, just do the right thing expectation of progress towards a goal is key to motivation. we are not motivated if we don’t know next step. we are …
Visually pleasing designs use consistent type styles and spacing, create a visual hierarchy, and utilize an underlying grid structure.
It’s never going to win a James Beard Award. Or try to wow you with its foam experiments or ingredients you’ve never heard of. But it is the best-run, most-loved, relentlessly respected restaurant in America. And, oh yeah, Danny Meyer, David Chang, and Shaq all agree. Welcome to Hillstone.
At Jane Street we use a pattern/library called “expect tests” thatmakes test-writing feel like a REPL session, or like exploratoryprogramming in a Jupyter no...
Tips for taking full advantage of this machine learning package
Discover the benefits of memoization for your Ruby application, common mistakes to avoid, and when not to memoize.
Discover the 9 best ecommerce UX practices from the world's top B2B ecommerce sites that made the top of HackerNews as the best ecommerce site.
After a little over 5 years, I'm going to be leaving GitLab for my next adventure. It's no surprise to those of you who have been following me that I have absolutely loved my time there. I'm so proud of what we built—and I'm still proud and awed by
How to Choose the Best Machine Learning Technique: Comparison Table
For a cost-effective way to reduce expenses, boost retention and drive new revenues, bring your outdated user manuals into the digital era.
Why do so many accomplished chefs call Popeyes their favorite fried chicken?
What it's like putting Amazon's famed Working Backwards process to practice in a small company context, and what was surprising and difficult about it.
A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from one of the most successful companies in the world
It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t.
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
A technology advantage isn’t enough to build an enduring enterprise SaaS company because at the core, all SaaS software share the same architecture. A relational database stores data and a web site presents the data. This is true for CRM (Salesforce), marketing automation (Marketo), email (Exchange), content management systems (Sharepoint) and so on. Because SaaS apps use standard databases, engineers can easily transfer the data from one database to another. I’m greatly simplifying here because differences in architecture may exist, but in principle it’s simple to extract, transform and load data from one relational database into another.
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is the
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
Welcome to engineering management. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, it’s rewarding — but most importantly it’s new! What worked for you before won’t work now. You’ll have to acquire a new set of skills, and shed some bad habits in the process. Here is a short guide to get you started.
Report templates, and guided steps to create them, so Product Managers spend less time in status meetings and more time out of the building
If you know nothing about OKRs, please start here: Art of the OKR. Or buy my book, Radical Focus. I think it’s rather good. An Objective is the goal you wish to achieve in a g…
Etsy COO Linda Kozlowski knows an operations leader is critical to the success of a company. Here, she sheds light on the most mysterious role in the C-suite — and how startups can hire and empower the right COO for their company.
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
There have long been a few fundamental challenges associated with business process management. But a relatively new and innovative technology, process mining, has the capability to revitalize process management in firms where it has lain fallow for years. One problem involves the creation of “current state” processes — a description of how a business process is being performed today. In business process reengineering, organizations are primarily interested in an improved “to be” process, so often they have little interest in exploring “as is,” or how the process is currently performed. The other general problem with process management is the lack of connections between business processes and an organization’s enterprise information systems. Enter process mining. Process mining software can help organizations easily capture information from enterprise transaction systems and provides detailed — and data-driven — information about how key processes are performing. It creates event logs as work is done: an order is received, a product is delivered, a payment is made. The logs make visible how computer-mediated work is really happening, including who did it, how long it takes, and how it departs from the average. Process analytics create key performance indicators for the process, which enables a company to focus on the priority steps to improve.
Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners. Rothman is particularly passionate about Marketplace technology (Etsy, Kickstarter, Airbnb, etc) and how to garner success in that category. Marketplaces are endemic to the consumer web: Largely popularized by eBay, we've recently seen quite a few variations on the theme, like young guns Etsy, oDesk, Airbnb, and Kickstarter. Old or new, the two elements that bind all marketplaces are network effects (a good thing) and the chicken-and-egg problem (not such a good thing).
A common issue when writing tests for real-world software is how to deal with third-party dependencies. Let’s examine an old, but counter-intuitive principle.
While I was leading PKC’s security practice, we did probably 20-30 code security audits, almost of all of them for startups that were just around their Series A or B (that was usually when they had cash and realized that it’d be good to take a deeper look at their security, after the do-or-die focus on product market fit).
New research reveals that how we perform work as a team contributes more to resilience than external stressors. On resilient teams, individuals feel responsible for energizing each other. This is in stark contrast to teams who are challenged by frustrating ways of working and fractured relationships. As we move into the third year of pandemic uncertainty, adopting three simple practices will help managers build more resilient — and re-energized — teams.
Questions that ensure you consider e̶v̶e̶r̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ a few things when designing a new feature.
In 2011, Elaine McVicar wrote an article describing the process of designing one of the first complex responsive sites. Now that the concept is no longer in its infancy, we're taking another look at how to redesign a large scale responsive site.
Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as “Kafka’s Castle,” a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel.
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The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.
📚 Papers & tech blogs by companies sharing their work on data science & machine learning in production. - eugeneyan/applied-ml
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+ engineers spanning multiple sub-teams. In the four years that I led the team (until Spring 2021), we did not experience a single severe outage (nothing higher than a SEV3). The Delos design is well-documented in two academic papers (in OSDI 2020 and SOSP 2021). Delos is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook.
Ship/Show/Ask is a branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more, without losing out on feedback.
Former Amazon execs Colin Bryar and Bill Carr helped build the "invention machine" that enabled the company to successfully launch everything from AWS to the Kindle. Here, they share granular advice and concrete takeaways for startups looking to alter their own trajectories.
A methodology for building modern, scalable, maintainable software-as-a-service apps.
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…