cityhash64

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.

Percentiles (50th, 99th, 99.9th, 99.99th) are more accurate and informative than averages in the vast majority of distributed systems. Using a mean assumes that the metric under evaluation follows a bell curve but, in practice, this describes very few metrics an engineer cares about. “Average latency” is a commonly reported metric, but I’ve never o... See more

I have lured my friends into some extraordinary picnics, for I hold with the French that to eat out of doors in congenial surroundings is sensible. In Afghanistan we ate high on a hill outside Kabul and watched as tribesmen moved in to attack the city; at Edfu along the Nile we spread our blankets inside that most serene of Egypt's temples; in Bali... See more

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

It's now become unavoidably clear to me that I've been doing each of these things poorly. The job, the making, the pleasing, and, yeah, the being at home. And I can't live with that for another day. So, I've chosen which one has to go. At least in the way it's worked to date. Which is to say not working.

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