It’s no secret that the engineering industry is hyper-competitive. Finding and attracting the best talent is difficult, but a critical part of any manager’s overall success. Yet, I see far too many managers sit back and rely entirely on their recruiting team to build the hiring pipeline for them. To build the best team possible, hiring managers need to play an active role in building the recruiting pipeline, not just sit in the interview.

Serverless applications are quickly growing in popularity, taking over huge portions of new app development for tiny startups and massive enterprise organizations as well. If the buzz and excitement over new announcements and education on best practices for serverless at AWS reInvent this year is any indication, they will only grow in popularity as time progresses. With no management of servers to worry about, the infrastructure management that cloud providers take care of with serverless applications, teams can simply focus on what matters to them, and more importantly, their customers.

Traveling around the world with twin toddlers sure can be challenging to say the least. Everything requires planning far ahead and plans change constantly when something distracts them or they need a break or nap. For all the difficulty though, adapting to traveling with them has actually taught me a ton about traveling and making the most of a trip. From slowing things down to being more friendly, it’s amazing how much two two-year-olds can teach their parents about enjoying travel.

Seattle, the Emerald City, is best known for being gritty. Grunge bands, coffee shops, and legalized drugs aren’t most parents’ ideal picture of a trip, but there’s actually plenty family friendly fun to be had around town. The city’s connection to the water, aviation, and history actually mean that there are numerous activities for kids to enjoy. Every tourist in Seattle has to visit the Pike Place Market. Home to the original Starbucks and the fish stalls where they toss massive salmon around, it’s a feast for the senses.

Everyone thinks their system is reliable until suddenly it isn’t. With a service oriented or microservice based architecture, it can be easy to overlook a single point of failure that can cause a massive cascading failure, quickie harming users and losing their trust. Ensuring that a single failure is handled gracefully is of paramount importance in a large scale distributed system, but that’s much easier said than done. I’ve worked for multiple companies building large scale distributed systems and each company took a slightly different approach.

A few years ago, it felt amazing that I had figured out to get an unlocked cell phone and pick up a SIM card in Germany to have service and data there. Picking up a card from a vending machine in the center of Heidelberg, I was able to get data on my phone while traveling the country after only an hour or so of figuring out the setup instructions and settings on my phone.

Traveling with kids can be a new and challenging experience for parents, especially those used to traveling alone before. It’s certainly not easy and requires a ton of planning and advance work. However, traveling as a parent without kids can be quite a change too. After two years of months of preparation before trips with our boys, our trip to Stockholm and Berlin was quite different. Here’s how it varied.

With less than a month left until this year’s re:Invent, I wanted to share what I’ve learned about getting ready and making the most of it. This will be my third AWS re:Invent, and the first time I’m speaking. This year’s re:Invent is bigger than ever, and it could already be an overwhelming experience. With a full five days of workshops, sessions, talks, and events to explore, it’s best to prepare ahead of time.

I just upgraded from the Pixel 2 XL to the 3 XL last week, mainly for the improved camera. While the Pixel 2 had an incredible camera that seemed like it would be impossible to beat, I decided I needed to give the newer version a shot to give my photos even more of an improvement. While waiting for the new phone to arrive, and after selling the old one, I was left with nearly a week without a real phone.

Oslo may not be the most obvious location for a quick layover; it’s location up near the top of the world doesn’t make it obvious as a transit hub. But, with several low-cost airlines using it more and more as a hub, it actually makes a great place to spend a few hours or days between other stops. My wife and I found that to get to Berlin, it was actually more affordable to travel on Norwegian via Oslo than any direct flight.