CoffeeOps 03/12/2020

Epiphanies

All Topics

WFH/Distributed Team Tips and Tricks
Alternatives to Scrum
Engineering doesn’t want to release more often because of rebase/conflict hell
Apprenticeship vs sink/swim
Imposter Syndrome
Shifting into management? How? WHY?
Helping someone learn to code
Feature Flags for backend Migrations
Cookie-pacolypse
What is your go-to interview question that shows candidate’s general knowledge
Testing in production…
ArgoCD
Setting first SLOs
Most exciting even this year? Near disasters?
Cloud providers — which ones are your favorite? AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean, etc
3rd party in critical path

WFH/Distributed Team Tips and Tricks

Go through your normal morning ritual
“If one person is remote, everybody is remote”
For all meetings, having everybody be on zoom or google hangouts
Perpetual zoom call with video and mic off, but headphones on so that people can still contact you
How do you deal with hours? Do you feel guilty if you take time or breaks? Feel more guilty than I do in the office
Pomodoro technique
Separate home/work even if you’re WFH. Maybe don’t do chores/home stuff during breaks. Replicate what you would do in the office.
If possible, create a physical separation. Have a dedicated space for work

Alternatives to Scrum (Seriously I hate Scrum)/Can you do away with rituals

Best way to demonstrate you’re delivering is to fucking deliver
Scrum makes assumptions on homogeneity.
If I could keep one thing from Scrum, it would be daily standups. The touch point is valuable
Curious that you’re trying to move to scrum when you release fairly continuously. What value are you trying to get out of Scrum?
Agile/Scrum should be a framework. It should be flexible to fit your setup. Not a hard and fast set of rules.
Been burned too many times by way too long standups
Standup should be no longer than 15 min, closer to 5 if you can
As soon as a complication comes, connect those that need to chat later, and move to next bit of work
What problem is Scrum supposed to solve?
It was a reaction of the context of where it came from (waterfall)
So what is the 2020 version that is supposed to deal with 2020 problems?

Engineering doesn’t want to release more often to do “rebase/conflict” hell?

Have brought down the time to release to daily from weekly, but engineering leadership doesn’t want to release continuously.
Afraid of having to constantly rebase and fix conflicts, and then struggle to release because of so many rebases and conflict resolution
What is rebasing?
- Replaying your changes on top of commits from another branch
Daily releases are great, but I don’t understand the fear
Just went to CD with a monolith, and the concept is that each commit goes into production individually. Helps knowing who caused what errors in production
Time based releases are great in terms of testing out the deployment pipeline
Sounds like they’ve been scarred. Try testing it out on a single day, and test it out to build confidence.
Big changes are scary for a lot of people. Small changes are exciting for a small number of people

Apprenticeship vs sink/swim

Read an article about how as an industry we should be doing apprenticeship vs throwing people into the sea and letting them deal with it
Is that just one persons rant? Or is this a real issue
There are some companies that do mentorship, but they feel a bit rare
We’re a new industry, where the people in it mostly had to figure it out themselves. There hasn’t been a lot of time to establish a pattern of mentorship/learning
Teaching is hard. Establishing a curriculum is hard. The senior people are expensive resources, so on top of just being hard to teach generally, it can be hard to establish business value for mentorship/teaching
Imposter syndrome can make it hard to feel like you can teach others
How do you encourage more experienced people to not be perfect and teach others that it can be okay to NOT know stuff

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