9 items tagged “willlarson”
2022
People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software. That’s great, particularly if you avoid writing software with strict dependencies. Some managers get energy from coaching others. That’s great. Some get energy from doing exploratory work. Others get energy from optimizing existing systems. That’s great, too. Some get energy from speaking at conferences. Great. Some get energy from cleaning up internal wiki’s. You get the idea: that’s great. All these things are great, not because managers should or shouldn’t program/speak at conferences/clean up wiki’s/etc, but because folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.
— Will Larson # 1st December 2022, 6:35 pm
2020
Stories of reaching Staff-plus engineering roles (via) Extremely useful collection of career stories from staff-level engineers at a variety of different companies, collected by Will Larson. # 11th September 2020, 3:30 am
How the Digg team was acquihired. (via) Useful insight into how a talent acquisition can play out from Will Larson, who was an engineering leader at Digg when they negotiated their acquihire exit. # 3rd January 2020, 2:27 am
2018
Our provisioning tools for developer environments broke and no one knew how to fix them, so we reassigned new hires the zombie VMs of recently departed coworkers.
— Will Larson # 2nd July 2018, 5:27 pm
Digg’s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity. Riveting behind-the-scenes story of the disastrous Digg V4 launch by former Digg engineer Will Larson. # 2nd July 2018, 5:25 pm
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.
— Will Larson # 23rd April 2018, 3:03 pm
2009
django-springsteen and Distributed Search. Will Larson’s Django search library currently just talks to Yahoo! BOSS, but is designed to be extensible for other external search services. Interestingly, it uses threads to fire off several HTTP requests in parallel from within the Django view. # 25th February 2009, 10:28 pm
The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac. Will Larson’s impressively comprehensive guide to configuring and securing an Ubuntu VPS from scratch to run Django, using PostgreSQL and Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx. # 14th February 2009, 3:42 pm
2008
Replacing Django’s Template Language With Jinja2. Part of Will Larson’s series on taking advantage of Django’s loose coupling. # 22nd July 2008, 5:18 pm