Load Testing with Locust (Part 1)

We believe it’s critical to profile our systems under varied loads to understand their behavior. It’s important to assess the system using both “bursty” traffic, sharp changes over a few minutes or even seconds, and slow, steadily changing traffic. We profile not only…

Load Testing with Locust (Part 2)

Docker, Kubernetes and Google Container Engine

In Part 1 we walked through setting up Locust. We ran a single instance locally and then we deployed it as a single node to Google Container Engine (GKE). In this…

What Is the Customer Impact?

Failures happen and there is no avoiding them. However, we should strive to ensure they cause the minimum possible customer impact. I’m going to use a trivial story of something that happened to me recently to show why being able to measure customer impact during failures is…

OKR Process

A Technique For Planning and Ensuring Resource Alignment

The Problem

Every company struggles with resource alignment. Even in small startups, as people focus on different areas of the business, competing priorities will naturally arise. Sales will…

Trust, Uncertainty, and Being a Great Manager

Being a manager is a constant balancing act. Get too involved and you are a micromanager, not involved enough and you are “conflict averse” or an “absentee manager.” Each person — and person-task combination — needs a different level of involvement…

My Journey

I was recently listening to an episode of the Jocko podcast where he was discussing the book The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Musashi is renowned for his great swordsmanship; specifically his unique double-bladed style of fighting. Oh, he was also undefeated in his 60 duels — many of which were to…

Operational Simplicity

You’ve heard of the phrase KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid. It’s quippy, but is very profound. It has great application when it comes to building and maintaining infrastructure.

Operational simplicity means keeping the infrastructure that hosts your product or…