I'm Brian Duff, a Scot 🏴 living and working in the California Bay Area. I've worked, written, and presented about technology since the 90s, but my journey with computers started in the 80
I've changed companies again! I seem to be doing this a lot lately, but there are (as always) good reasons for it. This time around, the nice folks at LinkedIn reached out about a Distinguished Engineer role they had in the developer productivity spa...
I've been back at Google for a year already - it's hard to believe the time has passed so quickly. It will soon also be the 15th anniversary since the day I first joined Google in 2008. A lot has changed. It's a bit of an eerie experience at times - ...
When you first join a new org or company, draw a map. Months into some roles, I've made faulty assumptions due to my understanding of organizational relationships. I'd wonder why a function was inefficiently split across two orgs, only to find that i...
It just doesn't feel right. Your instinct is telling you it's wrong. But you don't trust it. You're rational. You believe in the scientific method. Cause and effect. Engineers don't operate on instinct. We're data driven. We look for root causes. We ...
You feel like you did OK, but the outcome isn't what you were anticipating. It often means you didn't do as well as you thought. There may be a slight, but correctable gap between your situational perception and reality. Sometimes external factors m...
Google Data Studio is pretty easy to use for simple analytics dashboarding. Its standard visualization components are pretty comprehensive for most of the simple problems I try to solve. When you want to do something more complex, you can build custo...
Here's a small sample that uses TypeScript + Cloud Functions I have a complicated relationship with JavaScript. I'm old enough to remember when it first appeared in Netscape Navigator back when the web was truly tiny and everything had a kind of bo...
https://soundcloud.com/brian-duff-467458622/duffblog-heimdall After the kids are fast asleep, I often tinker around with toy projects. I have a long history going back to when I first started programming at 8 or so of starting and generally never fin...
Friday will be the 14th anniversary of my first tweet. Umm... it hasn't aged well. The Internet was stunned by the revelation that I was reading my email. Reading email and messing around with Eclipse 3.3M5. — Brian Duff (@brianduff) March 5, 2007 ...
