Backend Software Engineering and Technical Leadership within distributed teams. From Viach Kakovskyi.
You Build It, You Run It. The slogan spreads all around the world across software engineering teams. It’s working great - the successful teams care not only about writing good code, but also how the code is serving the end-users in the production environment. For Highload projects running software turned into a separate discipline called Site Reliablity Engineering. As one my fellow (former DevOps…
Tech Lead is a relatively new role in the hierarchy of software development organizations. When I heard about the role for the first time, my first thought was Is a that software architect + team lead? I do not think that the definition is correct, but it’s a good way of thinking about that. In the post, I retrospect 3.5 years of my experience in the position that includes: leading one of the…
Yey, DevOps Book club was started in the office. I joined since I love DevOps, increasing the productivity of my team, and, of course reading books. I even did not imagine how useful it can be for solving day-to-day organization challenges with my team and my coaching as a tech lead. The first book for the club was The Phoenix Project written by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. People…
Evaluating accomplishments motivates me and gives a breath of fresh air for the new ones. I believe that it’s an essential exercise for goals setting. I’m proud to be a part of Atlassian Stride team in 2017. Working for the company accelerates professional growth gigantically. During my vacation, I analyzed the last year of really hard work (the hardest in my career) to make the list of…
As the blog post Pull Requests: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly claims: If you do not have time to write tests today - you will find the time for fixing bugs Friday’s night In other words, to establish solid reliability in production tomorrow we need to invest our time today. Your need for tests for your current project depends on: Size of the team that maintains to the codebase: return True if…
I am a huge fan of databases. I even wanted to make my own DBMS when I was in university. Now I work both with RDBMS and NoSQL solutions, and I am very enthusiastic with that. You know, there’s no Golden Hammer, each problem has own solution. Alternatively, a subset of solutions. In the series of blog posts The SQL I Love <3 I walk you thru some problems solved with SQL which I found particularly…
It’s doubtful that your backend has everything within one process: you need to read configuration, store customers’ data, write logs and metrics about the status of your software. If you’re working on a network application - it’s even more complicated: your database can be far far away from the running code. Some things can go wrong: a network blip might happen, the remote database can be…
Highload. It was the main buzzword for me 5 or 6 years ago. Since The Social Network movie was released, I wanted to develop such kind of software. The domain area did not matter for me then: dating services for founders of dating services, illegal online casinos or websites which stream questionable video content - everything would be okay. I wanted to be a part of the team which solves complex…
I remember that at my first paid software job we did not have a version control system: all code was uploaded to a folder on FTP server. Source Code Management was not very sophisticated: we just had the previous revision of the most important source files suffixed with .old in the same directory. Now having ‘just Git’ without a fancy dashboard like the one supplied by Bitbucket, GitHub, or GitLab…
Recently I looked into HTTP/2 and its comparison with HTTP/1.1. The adoption of the technology is growing - 16.1% of top Alexa websites already use the latest version of the protocol. I wanna understand HTTP/2 better. For now, I do not see any project to apply the technology in production. But we all know that another great way to learn something - is to teach somebody else. It happened that y’all…