Reflection

“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” That’s the first sentence of C. Northcote Parkinson’s essay in The Economist, November 1955, better known as Parkinson’s law. His example is an “elderly lady of leisure” who spends a whole day sending one postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis, a job a busy man would finish in three minutes. Fun fact: that sentence isn’t even the law. The rest of the essay is about why government offices keep growing, with rules like “Officials make work for each other.” I never needed an official. I made work for myself just fine. ...

Six hours. I had planned to spend thirty minutes on a proof-of-concept. Engineers overrun estimates all the time. But this wasn’t a planning failure, it was something I’d spent my whole adult life recognizing too late: hyperfocus. The kind where time doesn’t slow down, it simply stops existing. My coffee went cold. I missed lunch. I blew past my 6pm hard stop with more working code than I’d shipped in the previous three days combined. ...

There’s a moment that keeps happening to me. Someone I mentored two or three years ago shows up in a SIG call, on a maintainers’ list, on a stage at KubeCon. They’ve shipped something I couldn’t have shipped alone. They’re answering questions I once answered for them. And the part that gets me: they’re already mentoring someone else. That moment is the thing. why why It’s also the only honest answer to “why do you keep doing this when it’s not your job?” The loop closes, and you get to watch. ↩ Everything else I write here is a footnote to that moment. ...

Every now and then a project surprises you by remembering something you said years ago. This week was one of those weeks. A talk I gave at PromCon Online 2020 — The Zen of Prometheus — has quietly become part of the official Prometheus documentation. I am still sitting with it. Where it started The talk was born in the strangest year of my career. PromCon 2020 was online, like everything else. I was a few years deep into running Prometheus in anger, collecting scars from instrumenting services that didn’t want to be instrumented and writing alerts that kept me up at night for the wrong reasons. I wanted a way to package those lessons that wasn’t another forty-slide deck of bullet points. ...

Startups can be exciting arenas of innovation, filled with ambitious goals, rapid development cycles, and the allure of shaping the future. But when the pace becomes unsustainable, and personal values clash with company culture, the dream can quickly lose its luster. My recent experience at a machine learning inference startup taught me invaluable lessons about overwork, alignment, and the balance between idealism and pragmatism. Why I Decided to Leave The decision to leave wasn’t easy, but it became necessary when I realized that the environment was not compatible with my personal and professional priorities. ...