Engineering Culture

Your software could be the best in the world, but if you cannot get it in the hands of your users, failure beckons. Learn about how to deliver software efficiently with an analogy involving tea.

Recommended Resources

Continuous Integration

• AWS Codepipeline https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/
• Buddy https://buddy.works/
• GitHub Actions https://docs.github.com/en/actions
• GitLab CI https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/
• Harness https://www.harness.io/
• Semaphore CI https://semaphoreci.com/
• Spinnaker https://spinnaker.io/

CI quality tools

• SonarQube https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarqube/
• Snyk https://snyk.io/

Don't just take my word for it! Serious tech companies sharing how continuous delivery works for them.

• Monzo https://monzo.com/blog/2022/05/16/how-we-deploy-to-production-over-100-times-a-day
• Netflix https://netflixtechblog.com/global-continuous-delivery-with-spinnaker-2a6896c23ba7
• Meta "We decided to move facebook.com to a quasi-continuous 'push from master' system in April 2016" https://engineering.fb.com/2017/08/31/web/rapid-release-at-massive-scale/
• Squeaky https://squeaky.ai/blog/development/why-we-dont-use-a-staging-environment/

Recommended Books

• Continuous Delivery by Humble, Farley | See also https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContinuousDelivery.html
• Software Engineering at Google curated by Winters, Manshreck, Wright | Specifically Chapter 24: Continuous Delivery by Narayan, Jones, Shipe, Owens

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• DORA Metrics https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance
• Test Pyramid https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.html
• Marginal Gains https://www.meaningfulhq.com/marginal-gains.html

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

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The final installment of the metadata trilogy. Yes, a secret trilogy of system monitoring! We share why engineers need to work closely with their colleagues in product, data science, design, marketing, support, and finance, because today... every company is a tech company.

Recommended Resources

Data Engineering

• Apache Spark for MapReduce operations on Big Data https://spark.apache.org/
• Apache Kafka for data streaming https://kafka.apache.org/
• Amazon Kinesis for data streaming in AWS https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/

Product Management Concepts

• AARRR aka Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics https://fourweekmba.com/pirate-metrics/
• Diffusion of Innovations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

Analytics

• Adobe Analytics https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/adobe-analytics.html
• Google Marketing Platform (formerly Google Analytics) https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/
• Mixpanel https://mixpanel.com/
• Amplitude https://amplitude.com/

BI (Business Intelligence)

• Microsoft Power BI https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/products/power-bi
• Tableau https://www.tableau.com/
• Sisense https://www.sisense.com/
• Snowflake https://www.snowflake.com/

Columnar data stores (OLAP, not OLTP)

• BigQuery https://cloud.google.com/bigquery
• Redshift https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/

A/B Testing

• LaunchDarkly https://launchdarkly.com/
• Optimizely https://www.optimizely.com/

Recommended Books

• Inspired by Marty Cagan | Best practices and strategies for creating successful tech products. Similar in goal and approach to this podcast, but from the product point of view, rather than engineering
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries | Creating a new tech product under conditions of extreme uncertainty, by "validated learning"

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• Data Science at the Command Line by Janssens | A good overview of some of the janitorial side of Data Science
• An example of a paid marketing strategy, which could be measured using pirate metrics (AARRR). A family video clip, purchased by a company, for social media brand viral marketing https://twitter.com/Skyscanner/status/852889390661726208

Final aside

• If like me, you hate the idea of every single web interaction you perform being monitored for the purposes of creating better marketing profiles, to maximise cash extraction... you can take small steps to push back. Run Pi-hole as your local DNS proxy https://pi-hole.net/

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

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Good teams know what service availability is in general. Great teams know what their service availability is specifically. Excellent teams, however, use their service availability budget to drive engineering decision making.

Recommended Resources

Service Level Objectives

• Datadog Service Level Objectives https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_management/service_level_objectives/

Recommended Books

• Site Reliability Engineering by Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy | Foundational concepts for systems engineers, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• Alerting on SLOs https://sre.google/workbook/alerting-on-slos/
• Preventing the Collapse of Civilization by Jonathan Blow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
• Z Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation

Jonathan Blow's games are wonderfully made, and highly addictive

• Braid https://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/
• The Witness https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

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"It works on my computer!" is never a response you want to hear from anyone working in software. We share some of the fundamental expectations for keeping software services running, and the tools that engineers use to keep them.

Recommended Resources

The Four Golden Signals

• Monitoring Distributed Systems https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/

Alerting platforms

• PagerDuty https://www.pagerduty.com/
• Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps) https://www.splunk.com/en_us/products/on-call.html

Outside-in Monitoring

• Atlassian Statuspage https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

Cloud Monitoring

• for AWS, CloudWatch https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/WhatIsCloudWatch.html
• for GCP, Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver) https://cloud.google.com/products/operations

Service Monitoring

• AppDynamics https://www.appdynamics.com/
• Datadog https://www.datadoghq.com/
• Grafana Cloud https://grafana.com/products/cloud/

Telemetry Platforms

• Prometheus https://prometheus.io/
• InfluxDB https://www.influxdata.com/

Elastic's "ELK" Logging Platform

• Elasticsearch https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/
• Logstash https://www.elastic.co/logstash/
• Kibana https://www.elastic.co/kibana/

Recommended Books

• The Goal by Eli Goldratt | Management book as a fictional novel. Gives the key insight that every system has a bottleneck, and the gives examples as to the implications which are useful for knowledge workers to learn. Of its time, so contains anti-DEI themes.

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• AWS https://aws.amazon.com/
• Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/
• CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com/
• Fly.io https://fly.io/
• GCP https://cloud.google.com/

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

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Long term success only comes when individuals are given clear responsibilities, and held accountable. Here we share some of the fundamental organisational decisions that create accountable teams, which are setup for success.

Recommended Resources

Service Teams, as defined in the Spotify Model:

• Two short videos explain the basics of the Spotify model https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/03/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ and https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/09/spotify-engineering-culture-part-2/
• The original PDF summary, now over 10 years old https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf

You Build It, You Run It. Extending software engineering not just to software development, but also the skills needed to run it in production.

• Pulumi https://www.pulumi.com/ (Infrastructure as Code)
• Terraform https://www.terraform.io/ (Infrastructure as Code)
• Cloud Development Kit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/ (Infrastructure as Code)
• Site Reliability Engineering by Beyer, Jones, Petoff and Murphy https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/

Recommended Books

• Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Recommending again, because it's so core to how high performing teams work, including T-shaped engineers.
• The Phoenix Project by Kim, Behr, Spafford | Fictional novel dramatising how a struggling US based business turns successful by making several people, process, and organisational changes. A pre-cursor to the next book...
• The DevOps Handbook by Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis | Organisational lessons for modern tech companies.
• Skin In The Game by Nassim Nicolas Taleb | A philosophical look at the nature of accountability.

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• Cargo Cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult | When organisations try to make culture changes they don't understand, or don't want to see succeed

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

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Whether you want to be a better engineer, or you want your company to hire better engineers, the path is the same: you need to be improving. For engineers this means increasing certain skills around programming, development, and systems. For companies, it's about having the right engineering culture for your point in the company journey, and this won't be fixed i.e. you need adaptable leaders.

Recommended Resources

Becoming a better programmer is all about practice, practice, practice. Try to solve the problems on your own to begin with, without help, or AI tools.

• Advent Of Code - https://adventofcode.com/ | Join the r/adventofcode community for help if you get stuck https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/.
• Project Euler - https://projecteuler.net/
• HackerRank - https://www.hackerrank.com/

Recommended Books

• Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Statistical analysis of the behaviours and practices used by the most successful teams.
• Good To Great by Jim Collins | The practices that may help a company to achieve initial success are not necessarily the ones that will sustain it through more advanced stages of growth. This book emphasizes the need for continuous adaptation, rigorous discipline, and a clear vision for the future.
• The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas | Developing code is more than just programming skill. Learn some of the pragmatic, soft skills needed to become a great software engineer.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, Sussman | If developing programming skill is about practice, this classic book provides the theory to direct where to practice next.
• Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnsson, Vlissides | The classic "Gang of Four" book on common design patterns in software.
• Head First Design Patterns by Freeman, Robson | Alternative to the classic, this book uses different methods of presenting the information in a way they claim is "brain-friendly".
• The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz | Helps set out the skills required for engineers at various stages in their career, up to and including management, or continuing on the individual contributor path to more strategic, company wide positions.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann | How to design distributed software systems with an eye on reliability, scalability, and maintainability, as well as many other key operational characteristics for modern internet economy services.

Links to items mentioned in the episode

• Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham - https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
• Why Software Is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen - https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-software-is-eating-the-world-annotated
• WCAG Compliance - https://wcag.com/resource/what-is-wcag/
• Code Golf - https://code.golf/

Interviewing is hard and random (so don't let it get you down)

• I Cheated on My Microsoft Interview by Robert Sweeney [https://www.facet.net/posts/i-cheated-on-my-microsoft-interview]
• "...can't invert a binary tree..." by @mxcl [https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768]

Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Engineering Culture podcast! We give an overview of what the podcast is about, why you should listen to us, and plans for the future.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.