eMAG Tech Talks: HAProxy & eMAG Technical Academy
It’s been a busy time for eMAG TechTalks and we had a very interesting session this week, with George Negoita taking us through his knowledge of HAProxy and Adriana Cirstea and Andreea Scurtu giving us their insight on our Technical Academy.
Let’s take a quick peek at each topic and what they are actually all about:
HA Proxy
In the first discussion topic, George Negoita shared some of the knowledge that our infrastructure department has gained in more than four years of using HAProxy in eMAG. He started with some theoretical aspects of high availability, redundancy and scaling.
Scaling was one of the hot subjects in eMAG in the last years because the workload that had to be handled by our infrastructure has increased almost every day. HAProxy is one of the key components that allowed us to scale our infrastructure horizontally.
Another reason for using HAProxy was high availability. Everybody wants 100% uptime, but this is not possible in real life. Furthermore, it has helped us to reduce the downtime of our applications, thus increasing the satisfaction of our internal and external users.
After those basic concepts, the discussion continued with general concepts of how HAProxy works and a detailed presentation of a few of its features that are important for our infrastructure. At the end, George covered some basic concepts of configuring and debugging HAProxy.
eMAG Technical Academy
In the second presentation Adriana Cirstea and Andreea Scurtu talked a lot about our Tech Academy and explained some main ideas that we should keep in mind when looking at this project. The eMAG Technical Academy is a program designed for eMAG employees only. Its main purpose is to address the development needs of every employee. In the long run, the program will improve know-how, the way people work and think, and it will ultimately have a positive impact on the business by faster deployments, higher quality services and products and improved workflow.
You may think of it as a benefit that eMAG offers to its employees but in fact both sides benefit from this program. By investing in our employees, we prepare for the future, and have a major advantage over our competition, by creating teams of specialists that can answer on the spot to any needs of the company. Also, this gives us the edge in keeping our employees satisfied. In today’s fast moving times knowledge is the key to having success. Investing time and money in the know-how of your employees is one of the smartest moves you can make. This will ultimately help you offer high quality products and services, keep you ahead of your competition, make your company a nice environment for your employees, as well as a magnet for talents outside the company. No one can take lightly an offer from a company that has the best interests of its employees in mind.
In short, investing in the know-how of your employees will:
- Make your business a talent magnet
- Improve your business workflows
- Become a great retention tool for existing employees
- Increase the efficiency and productivity of your employees
- Increase employee self-esteem and happiness
- Get you better products and services developed in house
To wrap things up, this session of eMAG TechTalks was another successful one and, as it happens at the end of every session, we’re left wondering what will come up next.
