Originally published at rmurphey.com on December 22, 2021. You landed in Tokyo for work in January 2020 and there was a text from your mom saying your brother was in the hospital with a surprisingly bad case of pneumonia. You’d seen him just a few weeks ago when the whole…

I wrote a version of this post in 2012. Nine years later, I have a seven-year-old son, my career has grown in ways I never could have imagined, grotesque income inequality is increasing at a staggering pace, and stupid internet fights about women in tech rage on. …

My job as an engineering manager requires a lot of reading. Every day, my browser gains a few more tabs as I open internal documents that people share with me in the course of our conversations. In sharing those documents, people are seeking to provide me with more detail, background…

Camille Fournier wrote a post a few months back about the challenges of product ownership for internal platforms. Her observations resonated with me a lot after four years working within an internal platforms organization at Indeed — how hard it can be to establish viable success metrics, how easy it…

A friend reached out to me the other day to tell me how he had encouraged someone to submit a talk to a certain programming language’s flagship conference. The talk had been accepted, but the conference, by default, doesn’t cover the cost of a speaker’s travel, accommodations, or conference ticket…

This post was originally published at rmurphey.com, but with the conference season heating up, I thought it was a good time to re-post it here with some minor changes. When I’m having a conversation with a prospective conference speaker, one topic that comes up again and again is how to…

Speaking at conferences has changed the course of my life. Conferences are where I’ve met some of my best friends; they’ve taken me across the country and around the world; they’ve given me access to a network of people that means I’m never wanting for work or for guidance. They’ve…