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Friday, March 27, 2020

Letting your CEO deploy to production

"One click" deploy (*)
Recently our CEO Raj Kumar spent a week in our Barcelona office where the majority of our engineering department is located.

I was working on some ideas for him to meet the team and get some insights into our daily work. While most of the company is aware of UI/UX and front-end changes we are doing to our site, some of the back-end and infrastructure work can seem like black magic. I think it is important to take every opportunity to bring this output closer to the rest of the company and especially the leadership.

By chance I watched the very good presentation “Getting Real about Managing up” by Kellan Elliott-McCrea, which contains as one example the idea of letting your CEO deploy to production.

One of the goals of our engineering team is continuous deployment. I set this out when I joined Devex to give us a far goal to aim for. I was inspired by Etsy’s Code as Craft blog and the book “Web Operations”. For me the important part was not continuous deployment itself, but all the changes in engineering culture required to achieve it. You need a good technical base from unit to integration tests, infrastructure as a code, continuous integration and a infrastructure team that is working side by side with the developers.

At the beginning this seemed to be an impossible task, QA and deployment were completely manual, there was no unit testing, no code reviews, a clear separation between developers and operations. The code itself was a mess too, with lots of moving parts, outdated libraries and no easy way to introduce testing.

But we slowly made progress, simplified the system and slowly worked our way up from deploying once in a blue moon, to once, then twice a week.

Currently we are at one deploy a day, with some manual involvement of QA. The deployment gets kicked off by a chatbot and is well documented in our engineering handbook.

The short version looks like this:
  1. Check QA status
  2. Tell the chatbot to deploy 
  3. Check the metrics
Everybody in the engineering team is already in the rotation of deploys and it is easy enough for everyone in the company to do it.

Our CEO Raj Kumar was happy to do it and sat together with our two infrastructure engineers to help him along. Because there are some permission requirements it was also easier to do it from the workstation of our lead engineer.

After some hiccups in QA the progress went smoothly and we had a new release in production.

I guess in the end he was surprised how boring it turned out to be. Which a deploy should be.





btw: we are hiring: Check out our current open positions


*) the hat is part of the deploy protocol and not a fashion statement







Friday Links

My Pandemic Zoom Setup
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/3/26/my-pandemic-zoom-setup

Two Years With Rust
http://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/03/22/rust.html

Helping FOSS conferences in the face of a pandemic
https://lwn.net/Articles/815913/

O'Reilly shutting down its conference group
https://lwn.net/Articles/815966/
https://www.oreilly.com/conferences/from-laura-baldwin.html

How to Run a Successful Online Conference
https://ianlandsman.com/run-an-online-conference/

Video conferencing with Jitsi
https://lwn.net/Articles/815751/

Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp
https://m.signalvnoise.com/remote-working-the-home-office-desks-of-basecamp/

The Housekeeping of the Intangible
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-housekeeping-of-the-intangible/

Podcasts / YouTube


Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team | Whitney O'Banner | #LeadDevLondon
https://youtu.be/Us6jaZoXgdU

Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers - Melinda Seckington | #LeadDevLondon 2018
https://youtu.be/np1rZvM9GD4

Beauty In Code
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWzjBygxodQkVTIQDEHjgbg/

How to Implement Good Software Development Processes with Eric Elliott
https://pca.st/episode/9f954057-d77e-4820-bcc5-2e8d07878c97

The Side Effects of Social Distancing
https://pca.st/wivktfy2

Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might do to help
https://pca.st/y7gzkrdr

Social distancing: learning to cope with a new normal
https://pca.st/w5jy3ygm

Engineer to manager and back again
https://pca.st/l1iv4xe5

Friday, March 20, 2020

Friday Links

How to survive isolation with your roommates, your partner, your kids – and yourself
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/17/self-isolation-survival-guide-relationships-coronavirus

The Simplicity of Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule
https://thefocuscourse.com/franklin-schedule/

A Few Small Things You Can Do as a Leader
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-few-small-things-you-can-do-as-a-leader/

Asynchronous Communication and Why It Matters For Remote Work
https://open.buffer.com/asynchronous-communication/

Hotspotting developer productivity.
https://lethain.com/hotspotting/

List of Free Software and Services During Coronavirus Outbreak
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/list-of-free-software-and-services-during-coronavirus-outbreak/

What the heck is Backstage anyway?
https://labs.spotify.com/2020/03/17/what-the-heck-is-backstage-anyway/

Facade Pattern in Rails for Performance and Maintainability
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/03/18/facade-pattern-in-rails-for-performance-and-maintainability.html

Atlassian finally unleashes free Jira tier – nearly six months late yet just in time for coronavirus crunch
https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/19/atlassian_free_jira/

Tech Ecosystem Barcelona & Madrid
https://www.joppy.me/download-report/

Google Just Confirmed A Powerful Chrome COVID-19 Security Move That Will Impact All Users
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/03/19/google-just-confirmed-a-powerful-chrome-covid-19-security-move-that-will-impact-all-users/

The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html

How to do effective video calls
https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html

CERT partners with GitHub Security Lab for automated remediation
https://github.blog/2020-03-18-cert-partners-with-github-security-lab-for-automated-remediation/
https://securitylab.github.com/research/CERT-CVE-2020-8527-automated-remediation-scale

Rails 6.0.2.2 and 5.2.4.2 have been released!
https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2020/3/19/Rails-6-0-2-2-and-5-2-4-2-has-been-released/


Podcasts


How coronavirus closed down Italy
https://pca.st/scko6d9z

Friday, March 13, 2020

Friday Links

pocket-reader.el
https://github.com/alphapapa/pocket-reader.el

retronym - Word of the Day : March 12, 2020
https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/retronym-2020-03-12

TBM 11/53: The Know-It-All CEO
https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-1153-the-know-it-all-ceo

Why cycling in Palestine is an intensely political act
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2020/mar/10/why-cycling-in-palestine-is-an-intensely-political-act

How to Break Apart a Rails Monolith
https://kellysutton.com/2020/03/12/how-to-break-apart-a-rails-monolith.html

One-track minds: Using AI for music source separation
https://tech.fb.com/one-track-minds-using-ai-for-music-source-separation/

Atlassian brings rules-based automation to Jira Cloud
https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/12/atlassian-brings-rules-based-automation-to-jira-cloud/

Powerful, no-code automation now available to all Jira Cloud customers
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/introducing-automation-in-jira

DBT: Your entire analytics engineering workflow
https://www.getdbt.com/

Amazon teases Bottlerocket, its take on Linux specifically for running containers
https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/11/amazon_launches_bottlerocket_new_linux_distro_for_running_containers/

Ready for changes with Hexagonal Architecture
https://netflixtechblog.com/ready-for-changes-with-hexagonal-architecture-b315ec967749

It’s now on us to respond': A new Atlassian study finds many employees would quit if their employer didn't align with their values
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/atlassian-report-employees-2020-3/

CIA Dirty Laundry Aired
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/cia_dirty_laund.html

How does Monzo keep 1,600 microservices spinning? Go, clean code, and a strong team
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/monzo_microservices/

How Dailymotion hacked its feature team project model to shorten time to market
https://medium.com/dailymotion/how-dailymotion-hacked-its-feature-team-project-model-to-shorten-time-to-market-618232f671da

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/hhgttg_42/

10 Google Ranking Factors You Shouldn’t Ignore
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-ranking-factors/

The Elephant in the Architecturehttps://martinfowler.com/articles/value-architectural-attribute.html

this artwork does not exist
https://thisartworkdoesnotexist.com/

Building a Rails App With Multiple Subdomains
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/03/04/building-a-rails-app-with-multiple-subdomains.html

Graylog at Scale
https://tech.xing.com/graylog-at-scale-b20aabd55cc4

Coronavirus

How to respond to COVID-19
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/How-to-respond-to-COVID-19

Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus Crisis
https://hbr.org/amp/2020/02/lead-your-business-through-the-coronavirus-crisis

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020
https://medium.com/sequoia-capital/coronavirus-the-black-swan-of-2020-7c72bdeb9753

Working From Home

Work in the Time of Corona
https://blog.alicegoldfuss.com/work-in-the-time-of-corona/

20 Ways COVID Made Me a Better Boss
https://www.learntoscale.us/thought-bubbles/covid-management-tips

5 tips for ramping up on remote work in a hurry
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/remote-work-productivity/

Slack on Slack: Adapting the way we work when offices need to close
https://slackhq.com/managing-remote-work-in-slack

Virtual Conferences

Amid Coronavirus Fears, Startups Rethink the Virtual Conference
https://www.wired.com/story/amid-coronavirus-fears-startups-rethink-virtual-conference/

Run The World
https://www.runtheworld.today/

Hopin
https://hopin.to/

Podcasts

#158 The Case of the Missing Hit
https://pca.st/arllgw2h

Work, Rest, and What You Will
https://pca.st/cecb2lnl

DBT: Data Build Tool with Tristan Handy
https://pca.st/eaa7a4nv

Enter the Matrix
https://pca.st/6si7hh7j

Friday, March 06, 2020

Friday Links

The Ultimate 1-on-1 Meeting Questions Template
https://www.peoplebox.ai/t/one-on-one-meeting-template-manager-questions-list
 
One-on-one questions
https://one-on-ones.app/
 
How a 2 person startup already uses 28 other tools
https://acrossapp.com/blog/how-a-2-person-startup-already-uses-28-other-tools
 
Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app
https://engineering.fb.com/data-infrastructure/messenger/
 
Wi-Fi Chip Vulnerability
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/wi-fi_chip_vuln.html
 
From one to two: how to start a successful distributed engineering office.
https://lethain.com/how-to-start-distributed-engineering-office/
 
World Bank staff call for canceling Spring Meetings — permanently
https://www.devex.com/news/world-bank-staff-call-for-canceling-spring-meetings-permanently-96683
 
How did software get so reliable without proof?
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2020/03/02/how-did-software-get-so-reliable-without-proof/
 
The WHO sent 25 international experts to China and here are their main findings after 9 days
https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fbt49e/the_who_sent_25_international_experts_to_china/
 
Production Oriented Development
https://paulosman.me/2019/12/30/production-oriented-development.html

Podcasts


Delete Your Account
https://pca.st/yhxjpwq9
Why Work Doesn't Have to Be Crazy
https://pca.st/e5k9gtxu