The 100x Engineer

A few months ago a new engineer joined our team. As always I spent some time with him to better understand the type of person…

So, You Want to be an Engineering Manager

For sure?

Node.js and The Case of the Blocked Event Loop

In [Pick Your Battles](http://zef.me/4235/pick-your-battles) I listed a few problems that we had in our production deployment of a big node.js codebase. Some people asked me to elaborate on one in particular:

Message Queue-Based Load Balancing

When you run a big mission critical web app, you have to two big challenges on the operational side:

1. Handling _failure_ — failure is all around: servers fail, processes crash, datacenters blow up.
2. _Scaling_ as traffic increases and…

Micro Services on the Client?

The Micro Service Architecture is all about splitting up your application’s (or group of applications’) functionality into separate services that communicate with each other in some standardized way, e.g. JSON over HTTP. While this approach is rapidly gaining adoption in cloud…