Why I love being a software engineer at D-Nitro
D-Nitro is a developer productivity and enablement team, we help 2000 other engineers with a team of 5. What’s that like, and what is it really that I do?
Originally published at https://medium.com on September 26, 2022.
This blog is part of a series of blog posts of my and my team members. Make sure to checkout the posts of my teammates Jevon, Pooja, Alex, Anita and Lais.
We started our D-Nitro team 4.5 years ago with the purpose of helping DevOps teams achieve quality at speed by providing tools and guiding them on using these tools. This happened in the middle of our digital transformation as more and more teams started to apply DevOps principles. We were only 5 engineers, public cloud was considered evil and our infra team had just started exploring Kubernetes.
Fast forward to today and we find 400 applications on public cloud, most of them using Kubernetes and applying CI/CD principles.
That doesn’t mean everything is perfect, there is still a lot to improve and many teams still need to make the step to real continuous deployment. There is more than enough left for us to do but what does that look like in practice?
We want mature DevOps teams that function fully autonomous and have full ownership on everything they build and maintain.
As a team we agreed to write a series of blogs in an attempt to show what we are doing. “A day in the life”, so to speak, except my days, weeks and even months are so different from each other. So instead of taking a day, let me tell you what things I have been working on.
The basics of the team
Currently the team consists of 3 seasoned software engineers and 2 amazing young talents that we hope to grow into excellent engineers. As a team we work hybrid and try to come to the office twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, to meet face-to-face. Those are the days to focus on collaboration and connection and we try to be there as much as possible. Of course every day we have our (extended) daily standup where we catch up on tasks as well as on life. We make it a point to prioritise personal and team happiness over anything else. This is also why every week we have an hour dedicated to playing Uno (or games) with snacks. We call this “Jennie’s Hour”, referring to our former team member Jennie who started this tradition. She was the one that showed us the importance of friendship and connection in the team.
We make it a point to prioritise personal and team happiness over anything else.
We currently practice a combination of Scrum and Kanban which is the result of experimenting on the best way of working for us. Something that needs to be revisited from time to time as the team, the work and our environment changes. This way of working also includes other activities like retrospectives, demo’s and the refinement of tasks/stories. Like with anything we do, we look to continuously improve the way we work so it enables us to be successful.
As a team we provide services and tools to all other engineers inside the company and this results in questions and other operational tasks like updating infrastructure, etc. At the same time we work on other initiatives including the development of a few application we created. To reduce the distractions we rotate our “Operator of the week”, leaving 1 person dedicated to answer any questions, take meetings and use the remaining time to work on general improvements (ideally to reduce the number of questions and other operational work). This leaves the rest of the team more focus on planned work.
We look to continuously improve the way we work so it enables us to be successful.
Fun Friday
The Friday within our department focusses on learning and self development. “Future Fit Friday” and other initiatives within KPN provide courses and workshops both internally and through external educational institutes. We also give each other the space on Friday to work on something different, explore new technologies, build something fun. By exploring and playing we can learn new things and discover if those are relevant to our team or the organisation. We do need to remind each other to do fun things so we don’t get caught up in our tasks. Some of our best and most creative features originate from Fun Friday.
The work I do
I love doing operations because I get to connect with other engineers, find out what they are struggling with, help them solve problems and teach them better practices. Often we answer the usual questions or help people figure out why their own pipeline is not working. From time to time we give workshops or presentations on solutions or inspire/consult teams with the automation possibilities. The time that I have left I invest in improving our documentation, creating new self service tools or working on new features on our Slack bot “D-3PO” that wanders around our Slack channels to ask clarifying questions and provide answers to common questions so we don’t have to. This gives us space to dive in to deeper issues and make additional improvements. The less others are dependant on us the more autonomy they have, which is what we want: mature DevOps teams that function fully autonomous and have full ownership on everything they build and maintain.
When I am not “on Ops”, I usually work on one of the two primary pieces of software we maintain. The Console, our own self service developer portal or Katka, our release orchestration tool. Katka enables teams to do continuous deployment in a way that also complies with the regulations that our organisation has to follow. Katka can save teams several hours a week and encourages teams to release after each merged pull request.
Our backends are primarily written in Python in a mix of Django and Aiohttp while we our frontends use VueJS. I like the fact that the work is full stack so that we can make our own ideas fully come to life.
Building Katka is part of the work we do to “close the gap” between the different tools that we use and the processes that we need to follow.
Building, maintaining and supporting solutions is not very different of course from a regular software development team. The best part of it is the really close feedback loop we have with our engineers. If something is wrong the teams will inform us faster than our monitoring and, them being smart engineers, they usually also know better on how to resolve the issue. They will also be very vocal on the solutions that we create and on what they want.
Lately I have been also in the business of creating video content. Content that we share regularly we are putting into short, bite-size video’s for people to watch. This gives us an opportunity to spread our knowledge on additional channels and point people to video’s where before we had to give the same presentation again and again. This doesn’t mean I don’t want the conversation with the teams, I do, but if they have seen the basics we can use the conversations and meetings to dive deeper into the matter at hand. I must confess that recording and editing video’s of myself is still very uncomfortable and really stretches me.
Accelerate: Next level promoting and knowledge sharing
Everything we build, create or want to see implemented we need to promote. We enable teams but have no authority, we can’t force anything (and we wouldn’t want to if we could). To increase the use and adoption of our solutions we find different, creative ways to spread our message. From being involved in the onboarding program of new engineers to virtual treasure hunts that have people searching all over our infrastructure and documentation.
At this moment we have the focus on “Accelerate” which is our big internal technology conference. We aim to get 500 of our colleagues together for a day full of inspiration and knowledge sharing. Together with technology partners and vendors that have talks and booths and prizes to win. With multiple keynotes and 25 different breakout sessions from internal and external speakers, we take inspiration and knowledge sharing to the next level.
Fun Friday: Fridays are to work on something different, explore new technologies, build something fun.
What’s love got to do with it
As you probably have picked up, my work is extremely diverse. Every day looks different and some days are super inspiring and creative while other days are about hard work and difficult questions. Regardless of the work, I am always surrounded by inspiring, talented people. We have fun together but also support each other when things are though at work and at home. Individual and team happiness is our number one priority which makes the work we do so much more fun. Those people, my teammates, are the best part of D-Nitro.
We are hiring! If you read the above or the blogs of my teammates and are interested in joining us you are in luck, for the first time in 4,5 years we have a public vacancy so make sure to check it out.
