What does complexity look like? 🕰️ - 123dev #20

Posted on September 25, 2021  •  3 minutes  • 485 words

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Self made complexity

Everyone is familiar with their own complexity. I’m sure this clock makes sense to the person who built it. When you’re the one who creates it it doesn’t seem complex but perfectly logical.

Complexity shows up in our daily lives, in code, in systems, and especially organizations. Fighting complexity isn’t always the right solution, but finding a complexity that can be reasoned about and understood by others is often the best solution.

Complexity that other people are able to understand is called common sense. It doesn’t mean it’s not complex, but the shared knowledge of the complexity is understood by others.

AWS App Runner

I don’t talk about my job in this newsletter much because this is a personal project, but today we shipped a new service I worked closely with to launch. I learned a lot about how AWS delivers new services and it’s very different from my experience at previous jobs.

One thing that was the same is how rewarding it is to ship a product as a team. All of my personal projects are great to work on and rewarding to see people use them, but it’s not the same as collectively delivering something bigger than what I could do on my own. For some reason I don’t get the same collaborative feeling when open source projects I work on have releases.

Links

Here’s a hello app I built for App Runner’s launch. I talked about some of the things I learned in previous newsletter posts and a lot changed while I was building it. I worked with one of our designers which was a great experience, and also worked with our open source program office (OSPO) which hopefully sets me up to open source more code in the future.

GitHub - aws-containers/hello-app-runner: Example application for AWS App Runner — github.com Example application for AWS App Runner. Contribute to aws-containers/hello-app-runner development by creating an account on GitHub.

Great insights

1. People like us make our money in the seams of things
2. Know what people are asking you to be an expert in
3. Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse
4. To go left, turn right
5. Thinking is also work

Read the article for fascinating stories and examples connected to each piece of advice

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people | by Marianne Bellotti | Medium — bellmar.medium.com As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best…

I had some fun trying to explain complex technology topics in simple terms.

Justin Garrison on Twitter: “Alright Twitter tell me a technical term and I’ll explain it in simple words” “Alright Twitter tell me a technical term and I’ll explain it in simple words”