Top 10 Posts of 2021

Dec 16, 2021

It's been 202 days since I started daily blogging at the end of May 2021. That's 202 posts on engineering, startups, and other things I found interesting. A look at my 10 most popular posts.

  1. An Overview of Docker Desktop Alternatives – At Google, I worked on minikube and other container developer tools. How these tools work can sometimes be seen as "turtles all the way down", and as a consequence, it's confusing what tools do what.
  2. Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming – Some lessons I've learned along the way. I did a podcast with the folks over at The Changelog on this as well.
  3. Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept – A fun mathematical analogy to hiring and thinking about potential. On starting in last place, know that slope always beats y-intercept in the long run.
  4. Service Reliability Math that Every Engineer Should Know – Expanding on a viral tweet I posted on Twitter. Quite timely with all of the outages in 2021.
  5. Kubernetes Maximalism – Why I think that Kubernetes will emerge as a part of every infrastructure stack (and why you might need to learn how to use it).
  6. ScapeNet: Real-time object detection in RuneScape – A fun machine learning project I did last winter for a class I was in. Probably the most programming I did in business school.
  7. First Principles – A longer essay on how I've chosen what to study and work on in school and my career.
  8. Don't Break the Chain – After writing consistently for 60 days, I wrote about my process. Based on an interesting story from Jerry Seinfeld.
  9. Chesterton's FenceDon't take down a fence until you know why it was put up.
  10. Ship Thesean Software – Refactoring software, technical debt, and ancient Greek ships.