Good talks/podcasts (May 2020 I)

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

Passion, Grace, & Fire - The Elements of High Performance (Josh Evans) [Engineering Career, Engineering Culture, Management, Teams] Josh Evans talks about the elements of high performance: passion, grace, fire, and what matters when trying to build and shape teams for high performance. He focuses on a period at Netflix when demands on engineering to quickly deliver multiple, parallel, large-scale technical transformations was the norm. The transformations enabled a global, scalable, reliable, successful streaming platform.

Evolutionary Architecture as Product @ CircleCI (Robert Zuber) [Architecture, Design, Engineering Culture, Microservices, Product] Robert Zuber discusses how the evolution of software development since 2011 has driven the evolution of CircleCI's architecture. From the explosive adoption of Docker to the steady rise of microservice architectures, the changing demands of software engineering teams have proven to be deeply coupled with the structure of their service–far more than they anticipated when they started the business.

The Foundations of Continuous Delivery (Dave Farley) [Continuous Delivery, Devops, Engineering Culture] Fundamentals of continuous delivery and how it is helping companies produce better software, quicker.

If (domain logic) then CQRS, or Saga? (Udi Dahan) [Architecture, DDD, Design] The “if” statement – the guard clause that makes sure that what shouldn’t happen, can’t happen. We see it all over our code base, especially in our domain logic. The thing is, when we use properties of domain objects in those if-statements, we don’t even realize that other agents may have just changed that data – or will change it just a second later. In essence, hiding behind those little “ifs”, are all kinds of race conditions and collaborative domains – the places where CQRS approaches are necessary. Join Udi for a different perspective on domain logic, CQRS, and long-running processes. It will be quite a saga.

Continuous Delivery and the Theory of Constraints (Steve Smith) [Architecture, Continuous Delivery, Engineering Culture, Technical Practices] In this talk, Steve Smith will explain how easy it is for a Continuous Delivery programme to be unsuccessful, how the Theory Of Constraints works, how to apply the Five Focussing Steps to Continuous Delivery, and how to home in on the constrained activities that are your keys to success. It includes tales of glorious failures and ignominious successes when adopting Continuous Delivery.

Making Work Visible: How to Unmask Capacity Killing WIP (Dominica DeGrandis) [Agile, Company Culture, General, Lean, Management, inspirational, toc] Are you scrambling to meet deadlines only to find more requests piling up in your inbox? Hidden WIP is a major contributor to clogged value streams and overloaded employees, burdened with too many meetings and frustrating work routines. Making work visible highlights the problems leading to low productivity across the organization. In this talk, Dominica shares how to unmask the things that are killing your team’s capacity and their ability to optimize workflow.

Full Cycle Developers @Netflix (Greg Burrell) [Architecture, Devops, Engineering Culture, Management, Operations] Greg Burrell presents Netflix’s journey from siloed teams to their Full Cycle Developer model for building and operating their services at Netflix. He discusses the various approaches they’ve tried, the motivations that pushed them to keep evolving, and the lessons learned along the way.

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Clarity.ai: Challenge accepted

Since April 6th, I have been working at Clarity, an incredible company with an essential yet difficult mission, to change the rules of capitalism.

Clarity aims at contributing to a more socially efficient capital allocation by providing decision makers with the most reliable and comprehensive tools to understand and optimize social and environmental impact, leveraging scientific research, and the latest technologies.

Anyone who knows me will guess that this is a mission wholly aligned with my values, so I cannot pass up this challenge. :)

In particular, I am working with the SRE team to create an internal platform that allows stream-aligned teams to work autonomously. Right now, the toil level is high, and although there is an excellent base (IaC, cloud thinking, etc.). The first step will be to help eliminate part of this toil by changing the way of working (optimizing the flow), the priorities, and simplifying some parts of the infrastructure that do not support core domains.

By the way, if this is a challenge that resonates with you, we have opened a position for the team:

We have the path to continuous delivery clear, but we need more capacity. Are you passionate about lean, devops culture, infrastructure as code? Do you like cloud-native architectures? #continuousimprovement #joinus #joinmyteam https://t.co/GWHRXIT3Zn @ClarityAIEng RT 🙏

— Eduardo Ferro Aldama (@eferro) April 17, 2020

Of course, in parallel to this process of reducing toil, we will try to expand the DevOps culture to the rest of the teams and provide tooling so they can have ownership of their services.

In summary, Clarity is a great challenge, with a critical and essential mission.

Related

• clarity.ai 
• clarity.ai careers
• clarity.ai SRE engineer job position
• @ClarityAIEng
• Personal Mission
• How vs What
• looking for new challenges

Looking for new challenges

Updated

Given the current situation and the impact it is having on Retailers and in the SaaS product for them, now, I am looking for new challenges (remote or in Madrid).

I am a software engineer passionate about people, technology, product development, and having an impact.

I help teams and systems grow from an end to end vision and with the ability to impact the development process, architecture, technical practices, agility, and product development. Using continuous delivery as a goal, I help teams become high-performance teams.

I have experience with CD, XP, DevOps culture, DDD, Lean software development, Lean product management and remote working (as a developer and as manager).

Here are my CV and some related links that may be of interest:

• Curriculum Vitae online
• Personal Mission
• How vs What

Update:
See: Clarity.ai: Challenge accepted

Good talks/podcasts (March 2020 II)

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• The Beautiful Mess (John Cutler) [Agile, Company Culture, Management, Product] John explains how we must all embrace ‘the beautiful mess’ and learn to navigate change in order to be more successful.
• What Will The Next 10 Years Of Continuous Delivery Look Like? (Dave Farley, Jez Humble) [Agile, CD, Continuous Delivery, Devops, Microservices, Technical Practices, Technology Strategy] In the 10 years since the publication of the Continuous Delivery Book, a lot has changed. Continuous Delivery has become a reality for many organizations all over the world and an aspiration for many more. Join the authors Dave & Jez to reflect on why Continuous Delivery has been such a successful concept, why it matters and where it is going. (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
• What Does it Mean to Lead IT? (Mark Schwartz) [Engineering Culture, Management]
• The Agile Revolution Podcast: Episode 180: Extreme Programming & 3X Explained with Kent Beck (Kent Beck) [Agile, Company Culture, Mental models, Technology Strategy, XP] An interesting conversation about XP including a potential reboot, 3x, TDD, TRC, etc.
• Progressive Delivery Patterns In The Wild (Dave Karow) [Agile, CD, Continuous Delivery, Devops, Technical Practices] Progressive Delivery and the statistical observation of real users (sometimes known as “shift right testing” or “feature experimentation”) are essential CD practices. They free teams up to move fast, limit the blast radius of issues found in production and focus engineering cycles on work that delivers results, not just releases.
• Modern Product Management (Marty Cagan) [Agile, Management, Product] An interesting Q&A session with Marty Cagan.
• Microservices and Rules Engines – a blast from the past (Udi Dahan) [DDD, Design, Technical Practices] Good insights about the real meaning of delete in different domains and about how to design solutions to model complicated services as search service, price service, risk service, that require to process information from different subdomains.
• Agile Essence and Fluency (Martin Fowler) [Agile, Engineering Culture, Technical Practices, inspirational] As agile software has got more accepted and popular, it’s also been subject to a fair bit of misunderstanding. This talk focuses on the essence of agile software development, adaptive planning, and people-orientation. Following this, a brief summary of the Agile Fluency model, which describes the typical path people follow as they learn and apply agile software development, is given.
• Practical Change Data Streaming Use Cases with Apache Kafka & Debezium (Gunnar Morling) [Architecture, Data Engineering, Design, Microservices] Gunnar Morling discusses practical matters, best practices for running Debezium in production on and off Kubernetes, and the many use cases enabled by Kafka Connect's single message transformations. He talks about how to leverage CDC for reliable microservices integration, e.g. using the outbox pattern, as well as many other CDC applications (maintaining audit logs, driving streaming queries).

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Good talks/podcasts (March 2020 I)

These are the best podcast/talks I've seen/listen to recently:

• Why So Serverless? (Bob Gregory) [Architecture, Engineering Culture, Scalability, serverless] Bob Gregory, Chief Architect at Cazoo, shares his teams insights into serverless architecture from their experience building a new eCommerce platform in a matter of months.
• AFH 107: Explore, Expand, Extract with Kent Beck (Kent Beck) [Agile, Company Culture, Mental models, Technology Strategy, XP] Kent Beck (@kentbeck) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss product development, Extreme Programming, certifications, and his new book on software design.
• AWS re:Invent 2019: Data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB (CMY304) (Alex DeBrie) [Architecture, Design, Scalability, Technical Practices, Technology, serverless] Modeling your data in the DynamoDB database structure requires a different approach from modeling in traditional relational databases. Alex DeBrie has written a number of applications using DynamoDB and is the creator of DynamoDBGuide.com, a free resource for learning DynamoDB. (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
• Mik + One podcast: Episode 1: Gene Kim (Part 1) (Mik Kersten, Gene Kim) [Agile, Continuous Delivery, Engineering Culture, Product, inspirational] They talk about: the Unicorn Project, the first two ideals (Locality and Simplicity and Focus, Flow and Joy).
• Mik + One podcast: Episode 2: Gene Kim (Part 2) (Mik Kersten, Gene Kim) [Agile, Continuous Delivery, Engineering Culture, Product, inspirational] They talk about the last three ideals described in The Unicorn Project; Improvement of Daily Work, Psychological Safety and Customer Focus.
• Intro to Amazon EventBridge (James Beswick) [Architecture patterns, Cloud, Microservices, serverless] Learn about Amazon EventBridge and how it can help simplify your application architecture. In this video, we'll cover common challenges and the benefits of an event-driven design supported by EventBridge. (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
• Technical leadership and glue work (Tanya Reilly) [Engineering Career, Engineering Culture, Management, inspirational] Let's talk about how to allocate glue work deliberately, frame it usefully and make sure that everyone is choosing a career path they actually want to be on. (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) (Thanks @islomar for the recommendation).
• Everyone Thinks They’re Managing by Outcomes. Here’s How to Actually Do it. (Teresa Torres) [Engineering Culture, Management, Product, inspirational] Interesting tips to make this mental shift. The talk is targeted at managers and leaders.
• Fast & Simple: Observing Code & Infra Deployments At Honeycomb (Liz Fong-Jones, Daniel Fisher) [CD, Continuous Delivery, Devops, Engineering Culture] You don’t need kubernetes to automatically push green builds to production – learn how Honeycomb has utilized CircleCI, Terraform, Chef, a collection of home-grown scripts, and Honeycomb itself to speed up its deployments and make them safer. We’ll talk about what went wrong along the way, and how we used our Service Level Objectives to evaluate and mitigate the risks.
• How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (Joshua Bloch) [Design] Every day around the world, software developers spend much of their time working with a variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Some are integral to the core platform, some provide access to widely distributed frameworks, and some are written in-house for use by a few developers. Nearly all programmers occasionally function as API designers, whether they know it or not. A well-designed API can be a great asset to the organization that wrote it and to all who use it. Good APIs increase the pleasure and productivity of the developers who use them, the quality of the software they produce, and ultimately, the corporate bottom line...
• If Russ Ackoff had given a TED Talk... (Russell L. Ackoff) [Lean, Management, Mental models, inspirational] This presentation is from a 1994 event hosted by Clare Crawford-Mason and Lloyd Dobyns to capture the Learning and Legacy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Russ knew Dr. Deming and speaks here about the difference between "continuous improvement" and "discontinuous improvement" as seen through the lens of systems thinking.
• Observability: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Charity Majors) [Devops, Engineering Culture, Microservices, Operations, Technology Strategy] In the first wave of DevOps, practitioners embraced change to incorporate development into design and build processes. To successfully build the next generation of software, practitioners will need to catch the second wave of DevOps to focus on controlling and fine-tuning evolving architectures. Honeycomb CEO, Charity Majors, discusses how to ensure buildability, empower developers, and make a truly observable architecture that’s primed for success.

Reminder, All these talks are interesting even just listening to them, without seeing them.

Related: 

• Recommended Talk/Podcast Database

Scalability Basics, application to systems, teams and processes / Caceres Devops Days 2020

A few days ago, I had the great luck to be able to present at the DevOps Days Caceres 2020, together with Fran Ortiz, a presentation about system and team scalability. We presented several mental models that help to understand or design scalable systems and organizations.

Video (spanish)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yPqHK5fjJ10

 

Slides

Original document

 References:

• Scalability is Quantifiable: The Universal Scalability Law,Baron Schwartz
• Queueing Theory in Practice, Eben Freeman
• Coherence Penalty for Humans, Michael Nygard
• Applying the USL to Organizations, Adrian Colyer
• Applying the USL to Distributed Systems, Neil J. Gunther
• Applied Performance Theory, Kavya Joshi
• Super Sizing Your Servers and the Payback Trap, Neil J. Gunther

Related:

• DevopsDays Cáceres Youtube channel All the videos from the conference
• DevOps Days Caceres 2020