Hi folks! I’m Jose. Welcome to my page

This month I’m listening to the audiobook “Influence: Science and Practice” by Dr. Robert Cialdini to understand the psychology of persuasion, why people say yes, through six core principles: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Cialdini is an academic, not a salesman, and he provides compelling examples and anecdotes. I don’t like to be manipulated and I don’t want to get what I want through manipulative practices, but it pays to understand what makes people tick. Effective leaders seem to have an intuition about this. For some it may come as “common sense,” while others may feel like they just don’t get people. I’d put myself in the latter camp. I can even confess that I chose my university major based on that. ...

One useful tool I use when I want to make a hard decision easy: I picture myself at 80 years old and ask, will I regret not doing this? If the answer is yes, I have to try it. If the answer is no, I can let it go and move on without losing sleep over it. I learned about this reading The Everything Store by Brad Stone. The idea is called the Regret Minimization Framework. When Jeff Bezos was deciding whether to leave his job and start Amazon, he used this exact exercise. He imagined himself at 80 and realized he would regret not trying, even if it failed. The potential regret of not trying was worse than the potential regret of trying and failing. ...

One of the things I learned at Amazon is how to manage a workload significantly larger than any other place I’ve ever worked at. I understand the reason for it: at Amazon the team that creates the service owns it. That means they are the operators and responders as well as designers and testers. As a result, senior engineers often have more than one project going on at any given time. So how do you keep track of it all? Well, I have a system of “rituals” or routines that I use. It’s very simple and I’ve taken inspiration from the “Getting Things Done” GTD method, as well as other time management books I’ve read. ...

One big challenge that comes up a lot at work is that there are always more things to do than time and people to do them. There’s always tech debt that we want to pay off. Long-term migrations away from systems that are going to reach their end of life, that weird bug that nobody knows for sure what’s causing it, the big project announced publicly that has a lot of visibility. Meetings to attend, Slack messages, emails to reply to, conferences, patents, books to write. You get the picture. ...

I just started reading an early access ebook copy of The Linux Memory Manager by Lorenzo Stoakes, thanks to the book bundle Linux the Good Stuff. I am trying to learn all about memory management in Linux. This is deep stuff. One time, long ago, at a different job, I implemented malloc for an embedded system running on a custom-made RTOS. At the time I felt like a l33t hack3r even though I’m pretty sure I copy pasted the code from somewhere, tested that the system boots, and called it good. Comparing that to Linux memory management is like comparing a tree house to the Empire State Building. So anyway, I need to dive deep and really grok Linux; it comes up a lot when debugging issues at work.

Being Oncall I’m primary oncall for my AWS Service this week, so I might not have enough time to write every day, but as promised here’s a quick thing, what’s oncall like? I’m not going to give you stories today, but I can tell you what concepts go through my head during oncall week. Monitoring Distributed Systems. Logs, metrics, alarms, how to read them, troubleshoot issues, respond to alarms. Ticket Response How to address customer tickets, making sure they have a good experience but have a bias toward self-service, otherwise the system doesn’t scale. ...

There’s a mental model that comes up a lot in my day to day. When I’m solving a problem, I start by thinking about the result I want, and work backwards from there. The challenge is having the clarity to define the problem and taking care that I’m solving the right problem. This is why I start with the goal in mind. I use the working backwards method when designing a feature. We start by writing a PRFAQ document, a document that specifies the public announcement of the feature with a section for frequently asked questions. When doing a small change or a simple bug fix, I also do the same thing, but instead of a PRFAQ doc I imagine sending an email to the team or a message on Slack saying what was fixed and what customers experience after the change. ...

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” –Yogi Berra Making decisions is a life skill, no doubt about that. Making decisions when you have limited info is common and it’s what eventually separates good leaders from the rest. On today’s episode of “One small thing per day” I want to mention a gem I learned reading “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke. Separate Decision from Outcome Do not use the result as a perfect signal of decision quality, especially when the sample size is small. A bad result can come from a good decision. For example Pete Carroll’s decision to pass and not rush in Super Bowl XLIX had a bad outcome but the decision making rationale was sound. ...

I recently finished reading Thanks for the feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen and I can’t recommend it enough, especially now that it’s performance review season at many companies. I’ve taken many lessons from this book, but I want to focus on something that was super insightful when trying to understand people’s interactions. All of us have blind spots. Things that we don’t see and don’t realize that we don’t see them. One of the causes is that we judge ourselves differently than other people judge us. ...

A new goal: publish a tiny micro post every day I have been meaning to write for a long time. I want to publish updates about what I’ve been learning in real time, but I always want to give beefy, meaningful, and helpful content, and that makes me put things off. So I think that starting now (bad timing, I know, this is not an April Fools’ joke, I promise), I will publish daily: one small thing I have learned. This way I can document my journey and my growth. I promise you this will be my real voice, not a chatbot instructed to give some buzzword-riddled slop. ...