Through the stack 2-04 (Week 5)
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 leads, 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.
Last week's episode was canceled due to travel and personal engagements. So this week's episode does contain some links that were planned to publish then.
Happy reading; I hope it helps.
Software engineering & Infrastructure
As often, we are going to see a bit of Ruby. With Ruby on Rails 7.1 approaching, we see posts about the release's content. There is this series of posts from @siaw23: part 1, 2 and 3.
This a good thread on remote pair programming and good practices.
Infrastructure
If you are planning to migrate to the cloud or change cloud infrastructure provider, you might want to read this good overview of what to do.
AWS shared a post on event-driven architectures following re:Invent 2022. Of course, it's based on AWS technologies but still good food for thought. Speaking of AWS, they have also announced the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region. It's not the first AZ in Australia (Sydney was first), but it will be good news if you need to have multiple presences over there. Sadly, no AZ in New Zealand yet.
When building new products or rolling out new features, we are often faced with the need to load-test the solution to avoid bad surprises. Here is a post covering scalability testing on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Digital Ocean has added a Developer Center. It's a great addition, as we have been missing such a way to find good, verified content about DO services and how to build with them. Now that DO has plenty of services to offer many of our clients are looking at using them rather than going with the big players (AWS, GCP, Azure) or low costs ones (OVH, ...).
Monitoring
Prometheus is still growing, and Google Cloud has been allowing us to use it for a while now. Here is a post on how to monitor GCE instances with it.
Have you heard of monitoring debt? Yes, me too. Here is a good post from Paige Cruz about how to pay it down.
Culture & communication
HashiCorp, home of many interesting services such as Nomad, Terraform, Consul, and Vault (to just name a few), has just introduced "Hermes" an Open Source Document Management System. This is a project I'll be trying soon as it could tie nicely with asynchronous communication habits. It plugs into Google Drive, so this might not work for you.
Leadership
Possibly mixing with the Software Engineering section, here is a long thread with plenty of good content to read. The content isn't from this week but spread over the years.
To echo, again, what has become a mantra in this newsletter ("keep it light"), let's queue in Mr. Holub for another tweet-sized wisdom to remind us of plenty of good practices in one go.
Want to plan the number of things to pull into a Sprint? Use throughput (avg. # of stories completed per Sprint). If avg throughput is 4, pull in 4 stories. Doesn't matter at all what the stories actually are. Focus on the work, not the spec. Small stories increases accuracy.
— Allen Holub @allenholub@mstdn.social (@allenholub) January 20, 2023
"Stay focused, and keep stories small". Those two things are really what a lot of tech leads, product managers, and founders should be told or reminded of regularly.
Another topic that keeps popping up when we work with partly remote teams is those hybrid setups rarely work well at first. As J. Stanier pointed out nearly 2 years ago: Treat everyone as remote. This post is a great overview of the issue of hybrid setups and how to work a better way to work by treating everyone as remote. One to read and read again.
On the hiring topic, this post is good food for thought.
There was also this long read from Google Cloud with plenty of details and information about how to design a chargeback process.
Will Larson keeps on writing good content. Here is one about Setting values for your engineering org. This echoes his book ("An elegant puzzle").
Entrepreneurship
A new section for this newsletter to cover another topic many of us work with. This a good reminder of how to get started. It's also a good reminder for engineer leaders as it can apply to leading projects in general.
It's okay to start a business knowing there are parts of it you'd hate to run or would be terrible at. If the basic idea works, you can focus on your strengths and handle the rest with ✨delegation✨.
— Ben Orenstein (@r00k) January 30, 2023
A post that might also be of interest to engineers appeared on Google's Cloud blog: "Transforming Japan's food delivery industry with Google Maps Platform". It's an interesting peak into a business and Google's services and APIs.
Epilogue
No books this week as I haven't had time to finish one and report on it. Still, there is plenty to read, as you have seen.
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, ...).