A journey in web development, [computer] science, engineering: getting to know what lies under the hood -- Giorgio Sironi
It is a (two-dimension) representation of a pipe. The map is not the territory , but in software engineering terms they are models of it. A frequent remark about models is that they are all wrong , as they eliminate many aspects of what they refer to. Big efforts can certainly go very wrong if they don't consider something that turns out to be very relevant, but models in general try to focus on a…
This is the description, and experience report, of an exercise I picked up many years ago and then used in a team I lead. I'll describe this in the present tense as I imagine applying the exercise in similar contexts. Credit to J.B. Rainsberger for coming up with this diabolical codebase and make us work on it! Context A team has been formed and has been working on a single product, for example a…
This is the description, and experience report, of an exercise I used in a team I lead. I'll describe this in the present tense as I imagine applying the exercise in similar contexts. Context The team has been working on a Typescript monolith application; Typescript is used exclusively on the backend and compiled with Node.js as a target. Encapsulation and modularization have been promoted as…
In the last few years I've been leading a team that has adopted ensemble programming and pair programming as the main practice to deliver production code. We have evolved cues that have a precise meaning for team members and that make communication more effective, especially when some of these phrases are used every few minutes. I considered various terms to indicate this set of phrases, and…
...is a developer-centric point of view? Generic data center image to exemplify a place many of us have never set foot into. After a few hours spent on upgrading the toolchain that starts from Terraform, goes through a few AWS-maintained modules and reached the Elastic Kubernetes Service APIs, my team was entertaining the thought of how difficult it is to set up infrastructure. Infrastructure…
I wouldn't call mob programming a methodology, but rather a practice that can be adopted. Like methodologies, however, it only surfaces problems and questions faster rather than providing solutions . For example, a team might have a low bus factor due to the specialisms of its members, and only one person might be used to edit code in a certain language or application. Other team members might…
I don't have a frame of reference for mob programming in a co-located environment, besides conference (or team exercise) workshops that didn't involve production code. On a video call, the driver is still always explicitly defined as the person sharing their screen and tools. This is similar to the person physically having the keyboard when you are all sitting around a table. The navigator can…
Our implementation of mob programming consists in a permanent Google Meet videocall, with camera on, in which we rotate a developer sharing a screen containing IDE and browser. So there are two unusual practices to get used to: being in a group all the time, and being on a camera all the time. I was originally surprised on how both practices went from exhausting to being a normal work day. This is…
With respect to a team assigning tasks to developers by their function (frontend, backend, infrastructure, and so on), mob programming fosters Collective Code Ownership . This is more in the sense that everyone should be able to contribute through the mob in any area, rather than everyone being able to prioritize on their own what needs to be improved. The pact is that our time belongs to the…
I've been practicing remote mob programming in my team for more than a year, writing more than 90% of production code inside a video call with multiple developers looking at the same screen. A bit of context I work in the scientific publishing domain, on web applications oriented to help scientists throughout their day. My current team has been formed from the start as a remote team, and has been…
Time for a light-hearted post. After my move to the UK and having had my share of fish and chips, I have become by reaction more interested in Italian culinary history and practice. So I started diving into the science and the tradition of cooking, reading books such as the science of meat which combine chemistry and good taste, and I have now cooked enough lasagne to build a statistically…
Yet another ship-themed name Containerization is increasingly a powerful way to deploy applications on anonymous infrastructure, such as a set of many identical virtual machines run by some cloud provider. Since container images ship a full OS, there is no need to manage packages for the servers (a PHP or Python interpreter), but there are still other environment-specific choices that need to be…
Image of a single container being transported by OiMax Before the transition to Docker containers started at eLife, a single service deployment pipeline would pick up the source code repository and deploy it to one or more virtual machines on AWS (EC2 instances booted from a standard AMI). As the pipeline went across the environments, it repeated the same steps over and over in testing, staging…
In the last couple of years I have integrated Content Delivery Networks into various eLife applications, managing objects ranging from static files and images to dynamic HTML. These projects mainly consisted of: implementing Infrastructure as Code for these CDNs inside the Github repositories we already use for all other cloud resources (AWS and GCP) effectively authorize HTTPS on the CDN side,…
This is a spur-of-the-moment review of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team , a business novel on team health that I've read today as part of the quarterly Professional Development Days I take as part of working at eLife . As a follow-up to my role evolution into Software Engineer in Tools and Infrastructure , I am looking again more into the people skills side of my job (as opposed to purely technical…
Eris 0.11.0 has been freshly released, and I'll be listing here various contributions that the project has received that are included in this new version and in the previous one, 0.10.0, which didn't have an associated blog post. For a full list and links to the relevant pull requests and commits, see the ChangeLog . 0.10 The Eris\Facade class was introduced to allow usage outside of a PHPUnit…
Production-Ready Microservices is a short book about consistently practicing architecture and design over a fleet of microservices. In general, I think the principles described here apply very much to any service-oriented initiative, even more so if the services are coarse grained and hence require more maintenance than finely isolated ones. Uber The book extrapolates from the author's experience…
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions is a book that puts together the domains of computer science and real life. The ensemble of topics being touched is wide. The book treats deterministic algorithms such as optimal sorting, but then moves on to more context-dependent strategies for caching and scheduling. The last chapter even get to model identification, (tractable and…
After working on eLife's testing and deployment infrastructure in 2016, in the last year my responsibilities in the technical team have shifted towards the domain of engineering productivity. Testing is one phase of the development process that is often a bottleneck, but there are many more areas like code reviews, monitoring and infrastructure itself (being it servers or services): In summary,…
Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems by Sam Newman is the seminal book on microservices as a concept. It was published at the start of 2015 (that's a long time ago in tech... or is it?), it's focused on high-level topics rather than implementation and hence has aged well. There are in fact several concepts, both at the methodology and the technical level, that the books does…
Not liquorice Post originally shared on eLife 's internal blog, but in the spirit of (green) open access here it is. Last month I have attended the PIPELINE conference in London, 2017 edition. This event is a not-for-profit day dedicated to Continuous Delivery , the ability to get software changes into the hands of users, and to do so safely, quickly, and in a sustainable way. It is run by…
The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? -- the book tagline Site Reliability Engineering - How Google runs production systems is a 2016 book about the ops side of Google services, and the…
In 2016 I moved to another country and as a result of this change I didn't had much time to develop Eris further. Thankfully Eris 0.8 was already pretty much stable, and in this last period I could pick up development again. What's new? The ChangeLog for 0.9 contains one big new feature, multiple shrinking . While minimization of failing test cases is usually performed with a single linear search,…
Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests is, well, a series of fifty quick ideas that you can implement on some of your automated test suites to improve their value or lower their creation or maintenance costs. These ideas are pattern-like in which they are mostly self-contained and often independent from each other. They are distilled from real world scenarios that the authors (David Evans, Tom…
Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter, collects stories of building and breaking habits , supporting the thesis that habits form an important part of our lives and that they can make a big difference for better or worse. Both in the case of positive training or learning habits, or in the case of addictions, repeated behavior influences our energy levels, our free time and in the end many of…