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I'm Brian Hicks, a programmer and author from St. Louis, MO. You've found my site!

latest post: platform engineers work on the meta-product

In what is platform engineering?, I gave this definition:

Platform engineering, as a discipline, takes a coherent approach to improving an engineering organization's output in ways that the rest of the business can see and understand.

I've had some thoughts and discussions since then, though, and I think that definition needs revising. Specifically, I tried to be very clear in the last post that I didn't think platform engineering could/should be gatekept. Problem is, that previous definition has some scoping issues—mostly around vagueness—that could work against that goal.

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currently: platform engineer at PayNearMe

In early September, I'll be starting at PayNearMe as a platform engineer. There's a lot to do there, but the theme will be making it easier to scale both the engineering department and the product.

This and 15 other projects →

latest micropost: CRDTs for tinyping

When I've been thinking about sync for tinyping, I've been using off-the-shelf CRDTs (mostly Automerge.) But thinking about it from very simple principles, I don't need all that. Tinyping can be broken down to:

  1. A log of timestamps
  2. Tags and other data for those timestamps
  3. A few settings (like the lambda value for calculating the offsets.)

I think we can sync that data with:

  1. A grow-only set for the timestamps (you never delete them, and they're implicitly sortable)
  2. Last-write-wins registers for timestamps and extra data.
  3. Last-write-wins registers for settings
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