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What sets distributed systems engineering apart is the probability of failure and, worse, the probability of partial failure. If a well-formed mutex unlock fails with an error, we can assume the process is unstable and crash it. But the failure of a distributed mutex’s unlock must be built into the lock protocol.

For the last several years, work-sample were our most important hiring decision factor.

We relied on them almost completely, and in doing so, we multiplied the size of our team and retained every single person we hired

duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

fastly was not a culture fit for me and it was dimming my shine

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

If you find yourself in this situation, resist being driven by sunk costs. When dealing with the wrong abstraction, the fastest way forward is back . Do the following:

1. Re-introduce duplication by inlining the abstracted code back into every caller.


2. Within each caller, use the parameters being passed to determine the subset of the inlined code that th

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