Here are some of my favorite books from the year, and the reasons I loved them.
Read MoreMy Favorite Books of 2018
The Age of Reasonabilism
To call the “intellectual dark web” a group of “heretics” with “dangerous ideas” and claim that their beliefs are based on rational and scientific thinking, is to do a grave disservice to the truth.
Read MoreRemembering My Father
The author and her father in 1993
My father passed away eight years ago. Today would have been his 64th birthday.
When he died, family and friends told me that the grief would subside with time, that time would dull the pain. The grief has never subsided, and, if anything, the pain has only grown stronger each year. The world feels less bright, less wonderful, less good without him.
Read MoreLife Without a Destiny
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 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 More