scale – Jessitron

Alignment gets expensive. Don’t skimp on it.

May 17, 2023May 17, 2023

Honeycomb has doubled in size since I joined less than 2 years ago. More people means we can do more things at the same time. Both “more people” and “more things at the same time” lead to increased overhead. There’s coordination overhead to get timings right on work that’s independent. Like, to release a feature …

To scale it up, smooth it out

September 3, 2019

To scale up the system you’re changing, scale down the changes. The bigger and more complex the system you’re working on, the more people involved, the more affect a change can have — the smaller each change needs to be. When change is expensive, when it’s scary, don’t make fewer changes. Work to make changes …