http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/
The title of the article is “Let a 1000 flowers bloom, then rip 999 out of them by the roots” by Peter Seibel, tech lead for Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group at the time.
Engineering Effectiveness is our name for what elsewhere might be called Developer Tools, Developer Productivity, Engineering Infrastructure, or Developer Efficiency. We provide the tools and processes that allow the rest of Twitter engineers to do their job, focusing on the things that are used by most Twitter engineers and which are not super Twitter specific: build tools, continuous integration systems, source control, and so on.
I recently gave a talk at Facebook’s @Scale conference about how teams like Engineering Effectiveness scale our work. This essay is the extended dance remix of that talk. The tl;dr is the same however: as an industry we mostly don’t know how to do it and consequently massively under-invest in making our engineering orgs actually effective.
I was reminded of this article by @dschenkelman’s tweet thread on internal tools at Auth0: