The Blameless Awakening (Jan 2013 – Mar 2014) Filed April 3, 2014 — the week healthcare.gov closed its first open enrollment, ending the saga that taught the industry to read postmortems. In early 2013, few companies published real postmortems. Outages were treated as PR problems, not things worth explaining. That changed fast. By 2014, writing an honest postmortem was becoming normal, and this 15-month window is where the shift started. ...

Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion and the internet is having feelings. Oculus was a Kickstarter! 9,500 people backed a scrappy VR dream and it just became a Facebook subsidiary. Backers got a t-shirt, Facebook gets the metaverse. Notch cancelled Minecraft-for-Oculus in protest within hours. The gamer in me is betrayed; the guy who watched the WhatsApp deal last month just adds a row to the spreadsheet. Zuck is buying every possible future: messaging, photos, now faces-with-screens-on-them. ...

The World Wide Web turned 25 this week. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and his boss annotated it “vague but exciting,” the greatest code review comment ever written, and a reminder to me personally to be nicer in PR reviews. He gave it away. No patent, no licensing. My entire career exists inside one person’s decision not to monetize. At work I’ve been handed my first intern to mentor for the spring. I’ve been professionally alive for not quite three years and I’m someone’s senior now? I made a list of everything that confused me on day one. It’s long. It’s basically this blog. ...

Facebook is buying WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. Fifty-five employees. That’s $345 million per employee. The engineers run the whole thing on Erlang, with a legendary “no ads, no games, no gimmicks” sticky note on the founder’s desk. Every engineer I know had the same two reactions in the same order: “that’s insane” and “what’s Erlang?” Darker crypto news: Mt. Gox, the exchange holding most of the world’s Bitcoin trading, has gone dark and reportedly lost 850,000 bitcoins. Possibly years of quiet theft. My coworker’s stash was thankfully elsewhere, but people lost life savings to what amounts to a single point of failure everyone chose voluntarily. “Not your keys, not your coins” is the phrase going around. ...

The creator of Flappy Bird deleted it today. Pulled it from the app stores at the peak, reportedly $50k/day in ads, because the fame “ruined his simple life.” One Vietnamese dev, one impossible bird, tens of millions of downloads, gone by choice. Phones with it installed are already listed on eBay for thousands. I have 100% believed this industry could produce every kind of story except “man walks away from money,” and here we are. Genuinely moved by it. ...

The Macintosh turned 30 this week. Apple did a big retrospective and I fell down a rabbit hole of 1984 footage: the Ridley Scott ad, young Steve Jobs pulling it out of a bag. My daily driver at work is a MacBook and I’ve never once thought about the lineage. Thirty years from “insanely great” to me running bundle install on it while eating a shawarma or a dilkhush. Progress? ...

New year, same deal: the world ships, I read the patch notes. CES just wrapped (curved TVs, so many wristbands), and before the badge lanyards even hit the trash, Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. The thermostat company. Except everyone smarter than me says they didn’t buy a thermostat company, they bought Tony Fadell’s hardware team and a foothold in your house. “The home is the next platform.” Every platform is the next platform. I just want my flat’s AC to have one setting between off and surface-of-the-Arctic. ...

Twenty-four entries. Didn’t miss one. Time for a proper retro, sprint-style. What shipped, world edition: two new consoles, Twitter’s IPO, the Hyperloop homework, Touch ID, a $35 dongle that beat a $99 box, and a joke currency with a dog on it. What broke: SimCity, Battlefield, healthcare.gov, the Old Trafford floodlights, Google Reader (murdered, not broken), and Bitcoin (twice, recreationally). What shipped, me edition: first feature, first outage, first postmortem, first 2:47am page, first time reading a query plan without moving my lips. My Tech Lead Proverbs file has 31 entries. My Fantasy Premier League team finished 4th out of 10, entirely on auto-pick momentum and one goalkeeper having a career year. ...

Two absurd things this fortnight and I refuse to rank them. One: Amazon went on 60 Minutes and announced delivery drones. Packages in 30 minutes by air. Everyone’s arguing whether it’s real or a Cyber Monday PR stunt (it aired the night before Cyber Monday, so you do the math). Two: someone made a cryptocurrency based on the shiba inu meme. It’s called Dogecoin. It was created as a joke and it already has a community mining it. Nothing means anything and I’m having a great time. ...

Both consoles are out, PS4 on the 15th and Xbox One on the 22nd, and both sold a million units in 24 hours. My own PS4 exists only as a January preorder receipt, but the group chat’s grey-import unit cleared customs Thursday and Killzone is, per intensive hands-on research at the one couch that matters, pretty. There are day-one patches measured in gigabytes for both consoles, and I’ve realized the industry quietly moved from “cartridge must be perfect” to “ship it, patch it” in my lifetime. We took the software deployment model and gave it to the living room. ...