Slaying the Dragon is a business history of TSR, focusing on the Lorraine Williams period (1985-1997). During this period, TSR recovered from the excesses of the Gygax/Blume Brothers period, launched the 2nd edition rules, novels line, and attempted pivots and expansions of their IP. However, the sales declined continued until they were purchased by Wizards of the Coast. Ben Riggs chronicles the company’s history, key products, and their strategic mistakes.
Slack’s business logic for showing notification periodically appears in LinkedIn posts and such. In Slack’s original post, this diagram was meant to illustrate what logic was being transferred from the multiple Slack clients to the server, but the diagram has since been taken as an example of product complexity and how development is harder than it may sound. In contrast, I think the diagram obscures the intended logic, but the logic itself is not complex. I’ll describe how to simplify it and where diagrams might not be the right approach to convey requirements.
Being on-call is often a necessary part of the job, particularly for engineers in a SaaS business. The burden of operations often negatively impacts morale and productivity. If we were to estimate the impact on a team, we could build a model based on incident frequency, ticket severity, time of alert versus sleeping schedules, and other operational metrics. Alternatively, we can ask the on-call engineers directly, which should be more accurate, and use the metrics to help drive improvements. This article describes an on-call experience program intended to be integrated into an operational review system.
COBOL is for Big Data. Well, sort of. Awhile back, I noticed that the COBOL SORT verb was overpowered. Rather than sorting an array of items or even sorting a file, it included a generalized ability to stream in arbitrary inputs — () => Stream[T] —, where T is a key/value pair, and process the outputs in order — SortedStream[T] => ().