As an: engineer at a large tech company how might the engineering work I propose get implemented?

Individual Contributor (IC) Engineers are the experts of the systems they develop and operate. They often propose what I’m calling IC Initiatives: units of work that take typically one to four weeks to complete, generally focused on improving the technical quality of the system. Examples include upgrading major versions of languages and libraries, significant code refactoring to reduce …

I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.

Perhaps a single pining mandolin
Throbs where cicadas have quarried
To the heart of all misgivings and there
Scratches on silence like a pet locked in.

Will I be more or less dead
Than the village in memory’s dispersing
Springs, or in some cloud of witness see,
Looking back, the selfsame road ahead?

By the moist clay of a woman’s wanting, …

Design from zero to achieve simplicity; don’t endeavour to reduce the complex.

I use this heuristic in software engineering for both code and project level tasks. I apply it to all tasks; whether they should take a couple of hours or several months to complete.

Systems have realities: design, constraints, and behaviours. Some are written down, some are unintentional, and some we’ll never discover. We want to make a significant change to a software system. Our goal is to design a …

I made a tool to visualise the file structure of git repositories: Longitude. The inspiration comes from work where I wanted to overlay team ownership across files and directories in some of the large monolithic code bases.

It’s very much an MVP and is a nights-and-weekends project. I’ve got a couple of ideas for the future:

• The option to size nodes based on lines of code in each file and directory.
• Utilise categories for file extension.
• Colour or size nodes based on LOC churn in a …