Practices

A few months ago, I wrote about vibe coding and the challenge of shipping quickly-created prototypes. I ended that post suggesting we could “teach” coding agents about our platform primitives through instruction files and MCP servers. At my day job (League), we’ve been putting this idea into practice, and the results have been very encouraging.

With engineering focus on reducing incidents and improving operational reliability, I frequently come back to the realization that humans are fallible and we should be learning ways to nudge people toward success rather than failure.

I’ve had cause to looked into research and ideas about the ways information flows within organizations. Discussions about transparency, decision making, empowering teams, and trust seem to intersect at organizational communication and information flows.

“Developers should only need Github Issues and Pull Requests to do their job” — Why should anyone need more than that to track work?

Practice makes perfect — Anonymous Parent

I often wonder if I’m being effective at my job. Might be related to my impostor syndrome, but in engineering management, the signals of effectiveness aren’t always clear. I have some basic, high level criteria I try to think about monthly, or so, to provide some insight.

I had posted about the way Tumblr uses time-series monitoring to alert on crash spikes in the Android and iOS applications. Since then, we’ve done a lot of work to reduce the overall volume of crashes. As a result, we created a new problem: it was possible for a handful of people, caught in crash cycles, to cause our stability alerts to trigger.