Hello! My name is Samuel Karp and I just bought one of those spiffy new .dev
domains. Now is as good of a time as any to start putting it to use; I have
been wanting a place to publish some writing about technology and this seems an
appropriate place.
I work for one of those large technology companies and a significant portion of my responsibility at work is writing: I write design documents, I perform code review and design review, I write one-pagers and six-pagers about technology in the competitive landscape, I help plan our products, and so forth. This blog, however, is a place for personal writing about technology; unless otherwise indicated, I speak about my own opinions and those do not necessarily represent the opinions of my employer.
Other than buying a new domain and deciding that now is a good time to start using it, there are a few other engineers whose highly technical blogs serve as good inspirational examples. Those are:
- James Hamilton’s Perspectives
- Tim Bray’s Ongoing
- Jess Frazelle’s Blog
- Julia Evans’s Blog
- Patrick Wyatt’s Code of Honor
- Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing
So as indicated by the title, I’m not sure how frequently or regularly I’ll be writing here. I don’t have a concrete set of things that I plan to cover regularly, and I’m not planning to chronicle the development of any of the personal or professional projects I work on. However, I also didn’t want to start a blog like this without some idea of what I want to write about, and I definitely don’t want this “intro” post to be the only thing up here. With that in mind, here are some ideas that I do want to write about:
- Planning a community technical conference (I helped organize the first Go Northwest conference last year)
- My experience as a first-time package maintainer in Debian
- How I’m publishing this blog (CodeBuild, Hugo, S3, and CloudFormation)
- Linux container primitives (I’ve given a conference talk on this subject and it might be useful to have it written down)
- How I feel about on-call rotations
- Reflections on Amazon’s Leadership Principles
- Helping to build an open-source culture at Amazon
Hopefully these are interesting topics to at least one person other than myself. And if these are interesting topics to you, please let me know! I’m not sure if I’ll have some commenting facility set up (Disqus, Commento, or something else) but please feel free to drop me a line by email.