Weekly notes (w.c. 28/10/2019)

Vijay
Vijay
Nov 3 · 3 min read

Enjoy, and if you have any questions or advice please do comment :)

Thanks for taking the time to read.

  • Overall, feeling quite good that I invested time to join a purpose-oriented organisation with a focus on social good. MyTutor seems to balance for-profit and for-social-good quite well. Probably the first time in my career where the ‘purpose’ part is being fulfilled from the three factors (autonomy, mastery and purpose) in Daniel Pink’s book Drive.
  • Some thoughts are arising about how to prove the results to the wider business of quality engineering and continuous delivery practices. Right now, one outsourced developer who knows the spaghetti monolithic code base really well can develop features quite fast from the POV of product (albeit with no automated tests, higher lead times and change failure rate). This is not sustainable and cannot easily scale as the company grows. I’d love to get to a point where the internal engineering team can take on one well-defined domain (or a few ‘slices’ within a domain) to show that the lead time and failure rate metrics can be improved massively in that area. But the journey to get could be a long one — growing team, lack of quality in inherited code, domain knowledge, technical experience are all things that will slow us down initially. Any advice on how to think about demonstrating results like this — what do non-technical stakeholders want to see to demonstrate value and progress of these kinds of efforts?
  • Arranged some more on-boarding sessions this week — both technical and not technical.
  • Met the leads of the keys business areas who gave an overview of their teams, goals and results. Super insightful and makes thinking about technical strategy easier already.
  • Great walk through of the ongoing DevOps efforts to in-house infrastructure, code base and pipelines. Got a wider view of the various systems, their infrastructural setup and key risks - this was really insightful.
  • Walk through of the manual testing and release process. There is a lot of complexity here — feature branches, many testing environments and some manual regression testing (though a good portion is already automated). I wonder, if quality was baked-in earlier into the process combined with incremental rollout techniques would we need these ‘late in the pipeline’ manual quality and approval gates? Something to think about as we take ownership of parts of the code base.
  • Decided to Bash script the local development environment setup as a side-project — it’s manual at the moment, a little time consuming and prone to mistakes. Scripting the steps from the wiki seems easy enough (until it isn’t!).
  • Went to this thing called “cinema club” where people watch tutoring recordings with the intention of observing and coming up with new ideas. Kind of a disaster as my production login wasn’t working, but got to watch one video at least.
  • Some DDD books arrived (the blue one and the red one) and people seem enthused.
  • Feels like overall the team do hold back on opinions and feedback at times — comparing to Unruly it feels like there is not enough debate and conversation. Agreed with my team lead to run a few short sessions on Radical (Compassionate) Candor and eventually 5 Dysfunctions to see if it helps the team in the coming months. This will be a challenge as I usually do more technical stuff, but I’m up for it!
  • Welcome lunch with the team at Flat Iron was nice.
  • Trialed starting and leaving work earlier some days of the week to avoid the commuter crowds and increase my evening time for gym sessions and cooking. Seems to work.
  • A particularly exhausting second week. By 4pm on Friday I was done and could no longer focus, no matter how much I tried. Instead, moved onto doing the company-wide Friday afternoon SQL challenge for a bit of fun.
  • Persisting cough that will not go away — sometimes feel London is a big germ fest.
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