UC’s Secret to 10x Engineering
10x Engineering Series – Microservices
This blog is a part of our series on “10x Engineering Series – Microservice”. The series covers two aspects:
— The 2-steps to lay the foundation of a microservice platform
— The amazing benefits that are unlocked
If you haven’t read the introduction, go here. Through our experiences, we hope to inspire you to build the right platforms at the right time!
What is 10x Engineering?
It’s a rhetoric. Teams that are able to operate at a much higher leverage to create disproportionate impact.
“10x” is a large multiplier delta. An individual’s hard work or talent won’t get you there. “10x” requires a certain compounding effect, across the team as a whole. High leverage comes in when the best practices become a habit, a ritual, a culture.
Secret to UC’s 10x Engineering?
We have grown to be a team known for bold interventions, timed well.
For long, our engineering teams have enjoyed the power of a well platformised microservices stack. It has helped us standardise a lot of common practices in engineering. It has helped us put structure to a lot of service level data. It has helped us build tools and processes on top that amplify our productivity and insights. All in all, it has helped us create an engineering culture of high productivity that focuses on impact.
Now, standardising the stack for microservices – that’s something most good organisations eventually come to. It’s a journey. So ….
What’s so special?
1.
First secret is in having the foresight to invest in platforms early. Platforms help save a lot of time by codifying practices. In fact, we prefer platforms to best-practices/guidelines – removes the human inertia by codifying it. Hence, for maximum benefit, you must time your platforms before technical debt starts to accumulate.
How early should one invest?
Too early is a waste.
Too late dilutes the impact. You have a lot of technical debt to now redo. Lot of code to migrate to the new platform.
However, in practice, we have hardly seen the “too early”. Most teams wait till the problems of tech stack are acute. Some of the top tech brands are still putting effort to consolidate their practices using frameworks and platforms. Most engineering teams are busy fighting a battle which we simply skipped by timing platformization well. We started building our platform from year two itself. Once we decided to break our monolith into microservices, we started off with a well built platform.
2.
The second secret is in decisive central leadership to push for 100% adoption. Platforms are best leveraged when they get full adoption across the teams. That’s when the team tends to feel the true speed and innovation that standardisation archives. This however, requires strong central leadership taking bold and decisive calls. While our culture is de-centralised, teams owning up their own mandate in mission and outcome – we do have a leadership that takes bold decisive actions. Done centrally, it makes it easy for all teams to buy into it and comply.
(Ofcourse, a lot of this boils down to taking the right bets, and not wrong bets. That is what good leadership is.)
3.
The third secret is in innovating on what all to platformise. We have been very creative in standardising lots of aspects of our stack, our coding practices, and our design philosophy. This is what creates an abundance of productivity boost.
As an example, our microservice platform answers all the below in a standardised, centralised way –
. How to communicate between microservices?
. How to monitor & observe a service?
. How to do events pubsub?
. How to write scripts?
. How to manage multiple environments?
. How to do CICD?
These are fairly standard as buckets, but how well they work and the details is where the secret lies. These are some of the amazing stories on what we can achieve:
- Tale : Zero Boilerplate Code
- Tale : Services & Scripts Sharing Code
- Tale : One Line To Monitor Them All
All this leverage is already available to a 100% of our teams, simply because of our investments in building a good platform for microservices at the right time.
Sounds like fun?
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You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture
https://www.urbancompany.com/blog/humans-of-urban-company/
If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com
