Interesting content Friday — 2019/07/12
[Article] Get your work recognized: write a brag document
Link: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
Many companies do performance reviews once or twice a year, and managers talk to their direct reports talk about the projects they worked on and the impact they had during that period. Most of the time you and your manager will miss something — it’s very hard to keep track of everything that happened in 12 months!
Julia Evans and others have written about keeping a document with all the things you’ve worked on and share that with your manager. I still think it’s your manager’s job to make sure you’re talking and tracking everything that’s going on, but it’s easier when there’s a shared document you update frequently.
It may be awkward to have a “brag document,” but everybody wins in the end. I loved this idea and I have already started mine!
[2h Podcast] How Seth Godin Manages His Life — Rules, Principles, and Obsessions (#138)
Link: https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/
Seth Godin is one of those people I can listen to for hours, always learn something, and not get bored. He’s a prolific writer and acclaimed marketer. In this podcast, he talks with Tim Ferriss about his routines, interests, cooking, books, obsessions, and even parenting. He recommends lots of books and audiobooks too.
Seth still blogs daily, which is something I’ve considered before but longer and more sporadic blog posts are more attractive for me (which is kinda irrational because there’s a lot of inertia to write a longer blog post).
[Article] Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy (updated) — 2019/07/02
Link: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage/
Last week wasn’t fun for Cloudflare, they had a major outage and probably impacted thousands if not millions of websites due to a bad regular expression (see regex backtracking). They released a configuration change to their WAF rules that was globally deployed, and many people have criticized them for doing any sort of global deployments, even when it’s a configuration change. We should probably treat configuration the same way we treat code because both change behavior! I found a very interesting Twitter thread from Charity Majors about this incident.
Cloudflare just published a detailed post but I haven’t read it yet.
[5min Funny Video] David Grady: The Conference Call
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbJAJEtNUX0
This video is funny because it’s a sad reality. I was on a couple of conference call two days ago, and this is exactly what happened! “We have the technology,” they said…
