The Critical Channel

The Problem: There were Legitimate Business Reasons, but we regret everything anyway.

With a title like this one, how can we not make it to the top of Hacker News?

This episode we discuss all the reasons you might not want to go down the Microservices route, and then tell you how to do it anyway. There's a lot of things to think about when you're on this journey, and we've gone ahead and made all the mistakes so you don't have to.

Plus, listen to the end to hear our collective shame about one time we all really buggered things up by trying to Standardise All The Things. Ah, simpler times...

Links:

• Samson Q2U Dynamic USB/XLR microphone

The problem: Turns out drunk babies aren't funny.

It's time for a break. We've focussed too hard, over the last dozen episodes, on bringing you top quality content related to engineering management, organisational culture, and whatever the third thing is that we say in every intro. Move over, titular easy problems - it's time for a podcast about parenting.

In this episode, we discuss side projects, whether companies should be able to lay a stake to the work you do in your free time, parenting, the peer pressure that comes alongside seeing others' side projects on social media, parenting, how and why you can be incentivised by your employer to work on side projects, parenting, creativity and how productisation can stifle your side projects, take a quick break from that to chat about parenting, before finishing up with a quick chat on trust and parenting.

Incidentally, one of us just became a dad. Coincidence?

The problem: FAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG.

The stars have been gone billions of years now. Black holes burnt out. All but one, where the last dregs of civilization fought over the last dregs of Hawking radiation, before that black hole too ran its course. Now there's only you, floating in the void.

A chime. Unmistakeably early 21st century, even untold millennia later: a push notification. You reach for your phone, pushing the obvious questions away - how has this artefact survived the aeons, the implausibility of it still having power or network - and with hands numbed by entropy, clumsily thumb the sensor to unlock it and read the eleven fateful words of the end of time itself:

"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn!"

This week, whether it's your first or your fifteenth job in the tech industry, we try to give some advice in finding it. How do you know which companies are going to be good places to work? When hiring, what stands out to us in a CV, and what's an obvious red flag? And how much is a life of Microsoft™ SharePoint® worth to you?

Links:

• Why senior engineers hate coding interviews

The Problem: It's never the API gateway (until it is).

Your monitoring is on point, you have a symfony of alerts with appropriate priority levels, runbooks are written and up-to-date, and your services autoscale like an absolute mother hubbard.

But Johnny Stakeholder doesn't give a damn how sophisticated your stack is. Johnny Stakeholder is going to trigger an incident at 4am, with the only details being a blurry photo of an inscrutable 500 error. Yes, Johnny Stakeholder takes pictures of his screen with his phone. Johnny Stakeholder suggests you deal with it. Johnny Stakeholder is going on a cigarette break and when Johnny Stakeholder gets back he expects it to be fixed.

In this second half of our Incident Response two-parter: what should happen when the pager goes off? We dissect a typical incident (at least, from our experience). How do you organise an effective response? What steps should be taken to understand what the underlying issue is? And what if you're not able to fix it in a reasonable time?

Links:

• Increment: What happens when the pager goes off?

The Problem: You may only know a single tcpdump command, but you're sure as hell going to use it.

We're trying something new this week - it's a two-parter! We decided to live up to our name and talk about critical incident response procedures.

In this first half, we talk about how to craft a sustainable on-call rotation, how to compensate your engineers for living with the stress of on-call, and how to convince management that you need an on-call rotation.

Plus, Warnar definitely does not advocate for drink-driving. Don't do that.

Links:

• MTBF, MTTR, MTTA, and MTTF

The Problem: You can't restart PHP if it's not installed.

If you're the kind of person who can't stand the clackety-clack of mechanical keyboards, then we're probably not the colleagues for you.

clackety-clackety-clack

After making clicky noises down the mic for the first half of the episode, we set our sights on hero culture. Why is it problematic, how do you know if you have it within your company, and what can you do to try and mitigate it?

clackety-clackety-clack

Are you the hero, and if so is it the one you deserve?

clackety-clackety-clack

Links:

• Kieran's Primary Keyboard: Dygma Raise (Kailh Speed Bronzes)

The Problem: You may be a fancy pants Junior Senior SRE Engineer, but Google Sheets is probably Skynet.

Job titles probably aren't important, except that they are. This episode, we wrap our heads around exactly why that is, both from your own point of view as well as your managers'.

Then Kieran ruins it all by quoting the Agile Manifesto.

Again.

Links:

• Obsidian

The Problem: It's 3AM, your Hue lights are going berzerk, and a shark has eaten your Youtube.

This week, we get deep into knowledge silos. How do you know if you have - or are - one? Is information trapped in heads somewhere? Where's the duct-taped together part of your application that might explode at any moment? Do you even know it exists?

If all that sounds anxiety-inducing, we come to the rescue with some tips on how to identify, mitigate, and avoid knowledge silos, so that the next time that one critical person takes a holiday the entire organisation's wheels don't grind to a halt.

Links:

• IFTTT - Send your lights into a color loop when the ISS passes overhead

The Problem: The right tool for the wrong job.

Tonight on the Critical Channel, we're joined by Warnar Boekkooi for the incredible Code Review Extravaganza!

Ready to be amazed? Come one, come all, for an evening of wonder and fantasy, exotic spectacle and death-defying stunts! Featuring Jira workflows! Quantum tabs! Raspberry Pis in a bin!

Plus: for one night and one night only, a reading of the most amusing commit messages to ever be reviewed by our hosts. You won't want to miss this!

(No clowns were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

Links:

• Your Code as a Crime Scene: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs

The Problem: Co-ordinating huge migrations is painful.

This week on the Critical Channel: Ítalo wants a tiny house. Kieran wants a $13 AliExpress screwdriver set and free conference t-shirts. Max wants more migrations. Pedro is not completely convinced. Some people hate change. HOOOONK.

In the main topic of this episode, we go into disaster plans and rollback strategies for when you have huge migrations, before talking about managing "cultural migrations", where a change requires a shift in organisational thinking over time.

Links:

• Living Big In A Tiny House