A few years ago, I started doing team reviews with the managers I manage, and have found them very useful. A team review (sometimes called a talent review) is a regular practice of talking about every person a manager manages, and checking in on their performance, compensation, and management actions…

It is not the best aspect of who I am that I get all snooty about coffee when I travel. When I moved to New York, I spent a couple of years rolling my eyes so hard as to sprain them at the coffee practices there—which improved over time, or…

We have some important news for customers and users of Skyliner: we will be shutting down the Skyliner service. While we have some very happy users of the service, we unfortunately do not see a path for continuing to run it as a stand-alone business. …

Last week, I went to Valley State Prison in Northern California’s Central Valley. A group called Defy Ventures runs a business training program for people in prison there, culminating in a “Shark Tank”-style competition. I was volunteering as a judge for their pitches. I had never been inside a prison…

One of the things we’ve noticed while working with Skyliner customers who are moving from Heroku is that the first step seems much bigger to them than it turns out to be. It takes a while until they devote the time to port things over, but then one day they…

If you’re worried about Donald Trump having the ability to start a nuclear war, here’s something you can do about it right now. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA-33) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) have introduced a bill that would prevent the President from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration…

I wrote in Fearing the Football about starting work on preventing Donald Trump from starting a nuclear war. Here I want to write about why this is probably a stupid use of energy, and then why I am spending that energy anyway. There’s an easy and good argument that worrying…

If Donald Trump’s administration worries you at all, it probably worries you for a very long list of reasons. The past two weeks have been an incredible deluge of bad news. For me, it’s very hard to decide where to spend outrage most effectively and sustainably. …

Skyliner started out focused on making it easy to launch web apps on AWS — specifically, apps that serve HTTP/HTTPS traffic to the internet. A very common request, though, is the ability to launch internal services, not accessible to the internet, using the same deploy and scaling tools we provide…