Getting Big Things Done

#102 – August 15, 2022

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We asked the PostgreSQL community: psql is by far the most popular tool for interacting with PostgreSQL, but it definitely isn't the only one. In this blog post, we look at which other tools PostgreSQL users love most.

this week's favorite

A while back, a colleague wanted to make a major change in the design of a system, the sort of change that was going to take a year or more, and many tens of person-years of effort. They asked me how to justify the project. This post is part of the email reply I sent. The advice is in context of technical leadership work at a big company, but perhaps it may apply elsewhere.

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic.

Ever had “hiring manager’s remorse”? It’s where you regret hiring someone immediately after they start. It could be that you don’t like their face, or just want to see the world burn. Worse, they might have mentioned they like jazz. Whatever the reason, this post is here to help you make them quit on their own by picking the worst starter project for them.

There's no more time-honored way to get things working again, from toasters to global-scale distributed systems, than turning them off and on again. The reasons that works so well are varied, but one reason is especially important for the developers and operators of distributed systems: metastability.

When experiencing team growth, things you did yesterday often won’t work for today. New problems need new solutions.

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