bytes.zone

đź‘‹ Hey there!

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.

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latest micropost: doing in a day what I could not in 6 months

I've been working on tinyping for quite a while now, in various forms. Six or seven months, in fact. I feel frustrated that I don't have anything usable to show for it. When I stopped doing thing-a-month, I wrote:

it turns out I'm pretty good at planning projects like this, but when I have such limited free time it's way too easy to overcommit.

That's still true! And unfortunately, removing the constraint of a month did not help. I have spent more time figuring out the local-first ecosystem than actually building something useful, and it's really starting to annoy me.

So I wonder: what do the ideas in tinyping look like I have to build them in an hour? A day? What does a different version of extreme constraint look like?

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Made with Love in St. Louis, MO. Have a wonderful day! ❤️