1:1 Question: What Is Your Stress Level since we last met?
One of the most effective tools in your toolbox as a manager is the 1:1 meeting. I have 1:1 with every member of my staff on a weekly basis. It’s a great opportunity to get feedback, provide context and just connect on a different level than the standup or pair programming sessions. In my first 1:1 with a new staff member, I emphasize that the 1:1 is their time, not mine.
On Culture
I see a lot of people talking about “culture fit”. I wanted to spend some time telling you what it means to me. First, let’s establish the baseline. I am an engineering manager at Globality. I have 16+ years of experience in this industry and I worked for and with startups and big companies like HP, Intel, SAP and others. I saw a lot of teams and a lot of “cultures”.
Using Bots to Solve Developer Drudgery
Scaling an engineering organization has a lot of moving parts. One of the parts we discuss rarely is reducing friction and reducing time spent on menial tasks to the absolute minimum. Figuring out “What is hard?” and “Should it be this hard or time-consuming?” is critical to the success of your organization. In this post, I’ll discuss flows we automated with bots. Pull request review We have an internal library that many our backend services share.
Breaking the Terraform Monolith - Silos of Infrastructure
At Globality we have about 120K lines of Terraform configuration that we use to manage our infrastructure. We manage everything we can this way. AWS, GitHub, CI, and more. We’re heavy users; we even go so far as to working with our patched version of Terraform while the official plugins catch up with us. For example, we recently moved a number of our AI classifiers to SageMaker, but the AWS provider didn’t support all of the configuration options we needed.
Updating Files With the Githup Api - Python
One of the features we have at Globality is to update build/setting files on all of our projects using the Github API. We use that when we generate a new build configuration or a new test configuration. Our build configuration consists of multiple file and directories. Usually in the convention of build.{{ project_name }} and docker/shell files under it + some files in the root of the project like entrypoint.
Bike Commuting in the Bay Area and beyond - Tips/Tricks and More
Bike commuting is great for many reasons, you stay healthy and fit, you get to enjoy time outside and you don’t waste your life away inside a car in traffic. I’ve been commuting with a bike in the Bay Area for three years now (all weather) and I collected a bunch of tips/tricks and beyond that might help you with your journey towards it. First, I would like to say, biking to work ***is possible, and it is a viable option.
Installing Python 3.7 on OSX
Getting python 3.7 installed on OSX might seem simple, but a quick Google search will show you that it’s anything but. If you don’t follow the steps, you will encounter multiple issues with the way the system is wired. I thought I am going to write a short tutorial type post on how to get it done. First, we will install pyenv brew install pyenv Once we have pyenv install, we can try to install python 3.
Generating CI Configurations at Scale
Intro You often hear about scale issues when discussing capacity, traffic, users and other resource related topics and issues. However, scale is often in the details, the processes and how things run at specific companies. At Globality, we have ~80 microservices running in production. We have FE, BE and Gateway applications. JS, Python and third party apps. Most applications also require internal libraries to run. All of this needs to be built, tested and deployed.
Insert a Line for Every File in a Directory
I recently imported this entire blog from Wordpress to Hugo. The move itself was smooth and there are a million blog posts out there explaining exactly how to do it. However, I wanted to do something different, I wanted to add a “warning” for every imported post saying that it might be broken and that you should be aware of that. I wanted to add imported: true to every file parameters.
Creating self starting worker machines for fun and profit – Avi Tzurel
I wrote a blog post in my other personal blog about how to create a machine that will manage it’s own lifecycle. I work a lot with background workers, and I constantly need a better way to manage my Resque worker machines, so I wrote a post about how I did it. I booted up over 50 servers with about 600 Resque workers using this method, and all with a click of a button in the UI.