Leaving Google: Five Years On

Published

Tags: , , and

About five years ago now, I handed in my Google employee badge and walked out of the Sydney Google office to start a new life of self-employment. I figured I should write up this story because I got a lot out of reading Michael Lynch’s. As you can see, it’s still taken me a couple of years to get around to writing this post, but I finally told myself that if I don’t write it for the fifth anniversary, I never will.

This post is kind of long, but I hope it has something useful for new developers who are interested in working at a big tech company, or for big company employees who are wondering what it’s like to quit. I’ll talk about my story of getting into, working at and quitting Google, and what I’ve done since. Feel free to ask if you want more detail about something, though I already have a lot of blog posts to write, so I can’t promise anything in-depth straight away.

Also, at the risk of labouring the obvious: I haven’t worked at Google for five years, so don’t take this story as a literal description of Google today or what all Google employees experience. However, I think a lot of it’s still relevant to tech careers in general.

Read more...

Scaling a GraphQL Website

Published , Updated

Tags: , , and

I normally write abstractly about work I’ve done for other people (for obvious reasons), but I’ve been given permission to write about a website, Vocal, that I did some SRE work on last year. I actually gave a presentation at GraphQL Sydney back in February, but this blog post got delayed a bit.

Vocal is a GraphQL-based website that got traction and hit scaling problems that I got called in to fix. Here’s what I did. Obviously, you’ll find this post useful if you’re scaling another GraphQL website, but most of it’s representative of what you have to deal with when a site first gets enough traffic to cause technical problems. If website scalability is a key interest of yours, you might want to read my recent post about scalability first.

Read more...

Update

Published

Tags:

So, I haven’t published any posts since the end of January, but I’m still around. I’m currently in Sydney, where many shops and most offices are closed because of COVID-19. The pandemic has disrupted a lot of my plans for this year (including DConf), but I’m hoping to get back into blogging at least.

There’s a post I’ve been wanting to get done since February, but I’ve split off some of it into a separate post I’m publishing now. Hopefully I’ll get the main post out a few weeks later.

Best wishes wherever you are. Right now I’m feeling pretty lucky to be in the IT industry, even though a lot of us are losing jobs, too. If you happen to know anyone working in health, or in warehouses, or emergency services, or as drivers, or as cleaners, or in other services, let them know there are people out there who have respect and gratitude for the work they’re doing right now.

urllibparse

Published

Tags: , , and

TL;DR: I’ve translated Python’s urllib.parse to D for parsing, building and transforming URLs. You can get it from Gitlab.

URL handling is one of those things that most of the time can be done with a regex that mostly works. But sometimes I want a just-works tool when writing D, so I translated Python’s URL handling library. The API isn’t perfect (e.g., the url_split and url_parse distinction is a bit confusing), but it’s been tested against multiple RFCs and had plenty of real-world battle hardening.

My translation is meant to give the same output as Python does, so I’ve translated the Python test suite as well. I don’t plan to add any new features that aren’t in Python.

I hope someone else finds it useful.

Some Presentation Slides

Published

Tags: , , , , and

Here are the slide decks to a couple of talks I’ve given recently.

Being Self-Employed in Australia (at JAIT)

Because this talk is based on my own experiences, it’s particularly relevant to service businesses in Australia. But if you’re interested in being your own boss, anywhere or anyhow, you could find it useful. As I said in the talk, there’s a lot of stuff that feels obvious to me now, but I ended up learning the hard way.

Introduction to Infrastructure as Code (at RORO Sydney)

Here’s a common story: Devs write an app, and do all the right things like using source control and writing automated test suites. Then it comes to deploy the code, and they have to figure out all these things like DNS and server infrastructure. They hack something together using web UIs, but six months later no one can remember the deployment process any more.

This presentation was a really quick introduction to the tools you can use to get more app dependencies into source control.

The Seto Inland Sea Trip, Part 2

Published

Tags:

This is the second part of my backpacking trip through the Seto Inland Sea.

Read more...

The Seto Inland Sea Trip, Part 1

Published

Tags:

I like exploring. A few months ago I finished a major contract, so I took the opportunity to do an adventure I’ve wanted to do for some time: backpacking across the Seto Inland Sea in Japan and exploring its tiny little rural islands.

(Warning: this post is image-heavy.)

Read more...

Update

Published

Tags: , , and

Just a quick update because I’ve been too busy to write much recently.

I’m giving a talk at DConf 2017 in Berlin! D’s been growing strongly in the past five years, and DConf’s been growing dramatically since the first one in 2013, so it’s pretty exciting to get involved. No, really. I often give tech talks at no-name events here in Sydney, but I’m half scared I’ll wet my pants on stage with a lineup like this — in my university days, I used to read all the C++ books by Andrei Alexandrescu and Scott Meyer that I could get my hands on.

If you have a DConf ticket, I look foward to seeing you there. If not, then you can look forward to watching the videos :)

Instead of writing a real blog post, I’m dropping a link to this classic about backwards compatibility nightmares, which you might like if you thought the mess that’s x86 BIOS booting was interesting. It’s a chapter from The Old New Thing, a book by Raymond Chen from Microsoft, based on his blog. Raymond Chen has spent a lot of his career making sure new versions of Windows can still run old software, no matter how badly the old software abused APIs and deserved to crash. Most of the technical details belong to the 90s, but there are plenty of morals for software development in the real world today. If you can read that chapter without ever wanting to weep for the industry, you’re stronger than I am.