Technical Investment – When and what kind of Kitchen Appliance to buy
A restaurant kitchen offers a useful metaphor for understanding technical investment: while end users care most about fast, high-quality results, what happens behind the scenes—like clean dishes and efficient tools—ultimately affects their experience. This post explores how to balance short-term delivery with long-term investments, and how to evaluate which tools or improvements will offer the greatest return.
ReadTechnical Migrations – Making a new path in the woods
Learn how to safely migrate from old systems to new ones without disrupting users—using the metaphor of building a new path through the woods. This post walks through a thoughtful, phased approach to change: building in parallel, encouraging adoption, adjusting based on feedback, and retiring the old system with confidence.
ReadMigration of Sprout Social's localization system
Localizing a dynamic application like Sprout Social into multiple languages is a complex undertaking. For years, Sprout engineering team got by with a scrappy homemade localization solution. While this solution served us for years, we were running into limitations more and more as the team and the application grew. In this post, I will outline some of those limitations and the steps we took to redesign our localization system to address those limitations.
ReadLanguage and Engineering systems are ingrown
In some ways we can think about engineering systems in the same way linguists think about natural languages. Both can become ingrown and complex over time. How might we relate what we know about how "simpler" natural languages are formed to engineering teams and systems?
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