My life is so different. I have no singular destiny, no one true passion, no goal. I flutter from one thing to the next. I want to be a physicist and a mathematician and a novelist and write a sitcom and write a symphony and design buildings and be a mother. I want to run a magazine and understand the lives of ants and be a philosopher and be a computer scientist and write an epic poem and understand every ancient language. I don't just want one thing. I want it all.
Read MoreFive Things Tech Companies Can Do Better
I believe that tech companies should make a commitment to their employees, a commitment that they will act ethically, legally, responsibly, and transparently with regard to harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and other unlawful behavior. In my opinion, this commitment requires five things: ending forced arbitration, ending the practice of buying employees' silence, ending unnecessarily strict confidentiality agreements, instituting helpful harassment and discrimination training, and enforcing zero-tolerance policies toward unlawful and/or inappropriate behavior.
Read MoreReflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.
Read MoreIntroducing Susan's Book Club
I've been searching for the perfect monthly book club for years, one that could send me new science, math, philosophy, and technology books every month. I contacted several publishers, reached out to various existing companies, and nobody seemed to be interested. Finally, earlier this year, after hearing another "no", I decided to start my own monthly book subscription service, and Susan's Book Club was born.
Read MoreInterview with InfoQ
In preparation for the Microservices Practitioner Summit on January 31st, Thomas Betts from InfoQ interviewed me about microservice standardization. Here is the interview in full:
Read MoreMy O'Reilly interview on microservice standardization
I sat down with O'Reilly's Mac Slocum at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference a few months ago to talk about the topic of my talk and my new book: microservice standardization. They recorded the interview and shared it on their site here: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/why-you-should-standardize-your-microservices
Read MoreBook of the Week: The Man in the High Castle
After reading Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep over the Thanksgiving holiday and watching the very first few episodes of The Man in the High Castle TV series on Amazon, I just had to read The Man in the High Castle, and I'm so glad that I did. Neither book is exactly pleasant to read: PKD's writing is extremely choppy, and the surface plots don't quite come together or make much sense. It was only after I read both that I realized why the plots were so strange: they aren't quite the stories that the books are telling.
Read MoreThe Four Layers of Microservice Architecture
In this post, I cover the four layers of microservice architecture - the hardware layer, the communication layer, the application platform layer, and the microservice layer - and what each of them contains.
Read MoreThe 52 Books of 2016
One of my goals this year was to read a total of 52 books - one book every week. There were no restrictions on which books would qualify, as long as each book was something that I actually wanted to read, read carefully, and took notes on while reading...here are the 52 books of 2016:
Read MoreThe Irreproducibility of Bugs in Large-Scale Production Systems
The crux of reproducibility when it comes to bugs is this: being able to reproduce a bug requires that the state of the system be nearly identical at the time of reproduction as it was at the time the bug originally occurred - something that is impossible to guarantee in large production systems...
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