Published in Gender From The Trenches·Oct 19, 2021Atonement on the Burden of Male PrivilegeAnd the privilege gap that exists between cis male and trans woman… — It ’s no secret that one of the hardest battles trans people may face is with themselves. …Transgender6 min read
Sep 25, 2021Double the killer, delete select all(If the title doesn’t ring a bell, google it for some good-hearted laugh) Today I would like to briefly discuss deletion. Now, If you’ve been through any software interview lately, there are usually a lot of good and interesting questions about storing data. Should it be indexed? If so, how…Software Engineering5 min read
Published in Gender From The Trenches·Aug 17, 2021I Feared I Would Be a Diversity Hire; Then I Actually Became One.A diverse hiring process may not be what you think it is — What does a diverse hiring process even mean? I’m a woman. I’m bisexual. I’m trans. I’m a-spec (on the asexual spectrum). That would count as ‘diverse’ on several accounts. Was there anything of real-world employment substance behind those titles though, given that I’ve spent over 15 years of my career performing as a man, 8 of those as…Transgender6 min read
Jul 27, 2021System Design — Interviews vs. Industry, a DevOps PerspectiveSystem Design — When Coding Alone Doesn’t Cut it Anymore Popularized by GAMFA companies (and considered a prerequisite skill for increasing levels of seniority), System design skills have become highly prized among developers. In a nutshell, system design is the practice of taking a problem expressed in real-world terms (e.g. …Dev Ops6 min read
Jul 17, 2021Monitoring theory, from scratch — business process monitoringIn our last post, it seemed like we had full error coverage within our grasp. Why aren’t we done? What is it that stops us from calling out every error our application makes as an event and raise it? The amorphous nature of the term ‘error’. True, some things are…Monitoring3 min read
Jun 16, 2021Monitoring theory, from scratch — events and transactions.In our previous posts, we’ve covered indicators and metrics. These were attributes of a system which we could define and observe. But we’ve also noticed that they have major limitations around analysis. Indicators supposedly circumvent this by virtue of definition and metrics by the operator’s analysis capability… surely there is…Monitoring5 min read
Jun 9, 2021A short dark humor break from the monitoring seriesI wrote these a few months ago and now seems like a good place to post these. TW: self-deprecating and dark trans-woman-in-tech humor. (Modelled after excuses made to management, product and end users): I’m… A woman, but not entirely up to spec [1] A woman, but with some technical debt. …Transgender1 min read
May 8, 2021Monitoring theory, from scratch — metrics and thresholdsIn our previous post, we have dived into the lovely world of indicators and have explored its value but also its limits. These limits have clearly led us towards observable values that are past indicators. That’s also pretty intuitive, we have everyday examples of metrics. Metrics If indicators were binary observables…Dev Ops4 min read
Apr 18, 2021Monitoring theory, from scratch — Indicators and syntheticsSo, our previous post has defined monitoring for us. As a brief recap, our key takeaway was that good monitoring allows a human to derive insights about your business’ operation, in order to prevent or minimize damage. In this post we will discuss the indicator, a basic and intuitive building…Monitoring6 min read
Apr 18, 2021Monitoring theory, from scratch — The definitionsWelcome! This series of posts is designed to let you, the reader, broaden your perspectives about the world of tech monitoring by way of a “from scratch” exploration. As a ‘foundations’ series, this should hopefully prove useful to you regardless of your specific technical domain, even if the focus will…Monitoring5 min read