Through the stack 1.23 (Week 43)
This is "Through the Stack," a weekly list of links relating to topics relevant to Lead developers (actual or aspiring) working with an internet-related product.
Many lead developers, tech lead, and staff engineers have their hands in many projects and influence many layers in their organizations. This publication aims to share relevant thoughts and content to such profiles.
If you have comments or content to suggest, please reach out to us by email through-the-stack@imfiny.com.
This week ...
We have a nice set of links about management and company culture. As often, it's a lot of food for thought. Some will help you if you are a junior team lead, some others are about our general issue with DevOps and Agile terms.
Then we have a flurry of technical content in the infrastructure and software engineering side.
This post is also published on our parent company's blog: https://blog.imfiny.com/through-the-stack-1-23/
Leadership
As often I'd like to share a little tweet from Mr Holub.
When you look at failed-Agile orgs, the root problem is often that nobody on top trusts the people who do the work. If they'd understood that agility required giving up control, they'd have run in the other direction as fast as their little feet could take them.
— Allen Holub (@allenholub) October 21, 2022
With those few characters, he walked, once again, right into the problem that we commonly see in organizations. Even without talking about Agile, many people at the top of organizations don't trust the people actually doing the work. If you are in a leadership role, please keep this issue in mind.
Leadership is not about control but about showing the way and empowering your team members to do better work. Trust is key. A book such as "The manager's path" by C. Fournier has some good points about this. And many others. If you want to scale and have an organization that adapts and moves fast you need to foster a culture of trust.
To follow up on this. Let's look at something quite in the same lines. As you'll read in the following two articles, we have an issue with both DevOps and Agile terminology. The first article, "Stop calling yourselves DevOps engineers", is a nice read and is specifically about DevOps: the definitions and the use of the term. Don't miss up on the books' references.
The other one, "DevOps: An Idea so Good, No One Admits They Don’t Do It", is shorter but along the same lines.
Infrastructure
I came upon a "Brief history of containers". It's a great read. There is a lot in there. This is the kind of article that gives you a good understanding of what has become a key piece in current architecture.
Following last week's link to this year's State of DevOps report, I dug a bit more into Google Cloud's documentation within its Cloud Architecture Center. There is a lot to read and plenty of food for thought if not direct inspiration to help your teams.
Following the little extra emphasis in their State of DevOps report, it's no surprise to find features around supply chain security introduced on their platform.
Ruby
@excid3 (aka Chris Oliver of GoRails) has released a new version of the prefixed_ids gem. An interesting little library to have prefixed ids with an optional salt for the random part of it. If you are not willing to use uuids as ids this might be a good alternative.
Hanami 2.0 is coming soon, the last beta before the release candidates phase is out. The other web framework for Ruby is gathering pace, features and good documentation. Although the historical weight of Ruby on Rails will make it difficult to replace it Hanami does present plenty of good reasons to use it for new projects.
Spotted in the (twitter) wild: an handy gem to access all kind of data about countries: countries.
As I had to introduce PostgreSQL's explain to a few people I dug out Chris Oliver little intro to explain in the ActiveRecord context. It's a handy tool to know.
And to conclude this let's finish up with a short and handy git tip about git & grep.
Epilogue
This is the end for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. There are quite some good reads in there and they might help you in your day-to-day work and beyond.
Don't hesitate to ping me through https://twitter.com/ThomasRiboulet_ or through through-the-stack@imfiny.com with content suggestions or comments.
Who are we, by the way?
This content is written and published by Imfiny/CloudPier22, a consulting company based in France. We do Ruby software engineering and DevOps in the Cloud (AWS, GCP, and others). We also train and support teams in their journeys to grow code, infrastructure, and practices (production engineering, incident management, retrospectives, ...).