steerpike

Oh my god. A Jeremy Morrell sighting in the wild.

Every time I share your blog (and I share it a lot) I tell people:

"This guy started a blog in 2024. Wrote three posts and all three of them would still make my top ten list of 'greatest posts on observability' today".

'A practitioner's guide to wide events' especially is still my number 1.

Australian flag. The black, red and yellow flag he replaced the Union Jack with is the Australian first nations flag

Yeah. 100% agree here. The Pandora algorithm was an absolute breath of fresh air relative to every other recommendation system. Just constantly surfacing new and interesting music that I had never heard of but was exactly what I liked. I spent so long hunting for info on how they achieved it and if their taxonomies had ever been open sourced.

In a recent thread talking about Flickr URLs I mentioned a couple of interesting technical features that Flickr had also done that I thought were worth celebrating. When gwern mentions that you should write in more detail about those things I feel you have to take that seriously. This is that attempt.

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It's still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn't expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

They implemented the Where On Earth ID (WOEID) which was a super useful way of disambiguating different places that shared latitude and longitude (for example, being able to disambiguate the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour which all can potentially share the same lat/long co-ords).

They implemented machine tags which are tags in the form of -

namespace:predicate=value

Which, when it was implemented by other sites with machine tags allowed you to get and group all kinds of interesting combinations of content.

Yeah, honestly flickr had some incredible tech the was so much fun to explore and use. That their vision of what the web could be wasn't the one that won is one of the great losses of the web IMO.

If you join HN and immediately start posting links to your own site you'll almost certainly be flagged by users.

It's just a question of ease. Where we lived in Bristol (Hotwells) we were exactly 28 minutes walk from Queen Square in the center of the city where I worked and 29 minutes in the other direction to Ashton court estate which is a deer farm and 340ha estate owner by the City of Bristol.

So I'll caveat this by saying we were a couple of Australians living in the UK and one of the big differences we noticed between Australia and the UK is just how damn clearly delineated the seasons are in the UK. In Australia they all kind of smudge into one another while in the UK it's really very clearly 4 very distinct phases of the year.

One of the byproducts of this is that we found UK winter in London to be pretty damn hard to get through. London is an incredible city and there's a lot to love about it, but the winters are honestly a fucking slog. We discovered that UK winters are way more tolerable if you have the opportunity to get out into the countryside with proper gear and just enjoy the natural beauty as much as possible. It a cliche, but there is something delightful about a big walk in the cold that ends at a country pub with a good meal and a roaring fire.

Bristol in particular is a beautiful city for a number of reasons.

Decent sized - so there's always something to do and jobs and conveniences are available (at least pre-Brexit)

Amazing music pedigree - still good for live music and some incredible bands came out of Bristol and surrounding areas.

University town - so good nightlife and fun things to do.

The river Avon - it's a river town which allows for lovely walks and natural beauty

Decent hospitality - Coffee in the UK is often seen as a fucking crime scene by Australians but there are decent independent cafes here and there in the city

Engineering history - The man with the best name in the world Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an incredible engineer from Bristol who left his mark in a number of ways (not least the extraordinary Bristol suspension bridge which we lived almost directly under)

It's just really beautiful - things like the pastel painted houses along the hills of the city make it incredibly picturesque

When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London.

Could also have been that Bristol is just a crazy beautiful city to live in, but where's the fun in that, right?

100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.

Honestly, in an industry that talks about how important collaboration is and then places the most authoritarian minded individuals as our lauded CEOs (Musk, Bezos, Gates, Jobs, etc, etc) I just find Charity such a fucking breath of fresh air in terms of communication style and the way she talks about and clearly lives her principles. Honeycomb may not be FAANG-sized, but I'd genuinely give more to work under her than any other current CEO I can think of.

Site Reliability Engineering.