Jonathan Chang and Michael Deng share all the details of the systems required to deploy at Slack.
Deploys require a careful balance of speed and reliability. At Slack, we value quick iteration, fast feedback loops, and responsiveness to customer feedback. We also have hundreds of engineers who are trying to be as productive as possible. Keeping to these values while growing as a company means continual refinement of our deployment system.
Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I am not sure why. When I start discussing this with other people I always end up repeating the exact same ideas over and over again.
So. Today I want to criticize the whole logging culture and provide a bunch of alternatives.
In short, I use git branches very rarely, preferring to work on my local master branch almost every time. When I want to work on multiple tasks in the same repository (i.e. often), I just… work on all of them on master. I waste no time creating a new branch, or switching to another branch to change contexts; I just start writing code and committing changes, all directly on master, intermixing different workstreams freely. This reduces my startup time to zero, both for starting new tasks and revisiting old work.
If the blog post ended here, you might think Drew is crazy. But he goes on to explain how he uses rebase to clean things up before pushing upstream.
I enjoy hanging out on master quite a bit, myself. However, when I’m ready to take on something “big” or “gnarly” I don’t hesitate to git checkout -b and work from there.
Jerod and KBall are joined by Micro Frontends in Action author Michael Geers to discuss (you guessed it) micro frontend architecture. We ask: what is the concept? How is it similar/different to micro services? Who is it best fitted for? How do you put it in practice? And much more.
There are many ways to SSH. Some have more security “risks” than others. Yet, we SSH everyday…but could you improve the security of your SSH infrastructure? Maybe. Let’s find out.
Most people can agree that using public key authentication for SSH is generally better than using passwords. Nobody ever types in a private key, so it can’t be keylogged or observed over your shoulder. SSH keys have their own issues, however, some of which we’ve covered in a previous post about SSH key management.
The next level up from SSH keys is SSH certificates. … With SSH certificates, you generate a certificate authority (CA) and then use this to issue and cryptographically sign certificates which can authenticate users to hosts, or hosts to users….
One of the great things about Git is everyone can develop their own branching strategies. One of the terrible things about Git is everyone has to develop their own branching strategies. In this quick post on the Adeva blog, Vedrana Tozija describes a strategy she believes is on point for small teams.
This is a written summary of Katerina Trajchevska’s Laracon 2019 talk on SOLID. Tosho Trajanov says it is a “must-read for every software engineer.” Here’s a primer on the primer:
SOLID is an acronym formed by the names of 5 design principles centered around better code design, maintainability, and extendability.
Dave Cheney talks to us about the Zen of Go (ten engineering values for writing simple, readable, maintainable Go code). What makes code good in Go? What guiding principles should we bear in mind when writing Go?
This is an excellent refactoring story using one of Shopify’s core classes.
As you can imagine, one of the most critical areas in Shopify’s Ruby on Rails codebase is the Shop model. Shop is a hefty class with well over 3000 lines of code, and its responsibilities are numerous. When Shopify was a smaller company with a smaller codebase, Shop’s purpose was clearer: it represented an online store hosted on our platform. Today, Shopify is far more complex, and the business intentions of the Shop model are murkier. It can be described as a God Object: a class that knows and does too much.
They use Martin Fowler’s Strangler Fig pattern to achieve the refactoring. You may recall we discussed this on our episode with Amal Hussein.
What do you do when you’ve determined you can’t refactor your way to greatness? For us, we knew where we needed to be, but the application architecture challenges we were facing seemed to be pointing us towards fully replatforming 😱. We had to get creative…
John Graham:
This article is written form the perspective of a medium sized software company, so not someone with an infinite budget. It talks about the way I started writing engineering road maps, how it helped me sell engineering to our upper management, and how it helped the engineering team deliver results.
The Fyne toolkit provides the easiest way to develop beautiful, lightweight and user friendly native applications for desktop, mobile and beyond. In this post, I describe our design process and why we take a considered approach, moving slower than you might think.
Umer Mansoor’s Technical Debt is Soul-crushing made the rounds last month and he followed up by adding a survey.
117 software developers from all over the world took the survey. The majority were from the USA, followed by Canada, Australia, Germany, India, Russia , UK and other European countries.
Not a huge sample size, by any means, but the results are interesting and worth scrolling through. This pairs nicely with our episode on good tech debt.
Dan Abramov and Dave Thomas got me thinking. Why did DRY come to mean “Don’t cut and paste”? I have a few thoughts on the subject…
Dave Cheney’s ten engineering values for writing simple, readable, and maintainable Go code. Some of these apply outside of Go, as well. For instance, Simplicity matters:
Simplicity is not a synonym for unsophisticated. Simple doesn’t mean crude, it means readable and maintainable. When it is possible to choose, defer to the simpler solution.
(Originally presented at GopherCon Israel 2020.)
Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.
Marco Otte-Witte:
When we set out to rebuild our own website simplabs.com in 2019, we wanted to use that project as an opportunity to ignore all economic considerations (and reason you could say) and dive deep into what was technically possible. Doing so would allow us to build something that was super customized for our specific needs and highly optimized for performance. We ended up spending a lot of time and effort but are quite pleased with the result.
While we cannot recommend anyone following our example as your time is most likely better spent elsewhere, this post explains the approach we took. I will be covering topics like static pre-rendering and client-side rehydration, advanced bundling and caching strategies as well as service workers.
Highlights added by me because this is a fun read (and no doubt a fun experiment for them), but I also cannot recommend you follow their example. 😉
Mailchimp CPO John Foreman drops some contra-conventional wisdom in this Smashing Magazine piece:
When I as CPO say, “we’re going to do this thing!” the reply then is often, “OK, so then what are we going to kill?” The Mythical Man-Month turns product development into a zero-sum game. If we want one thing, we must stop another. Now, that’s an actual myth, and I call hogwash.
Unpopular opinion! Monoliths are the future because the problem people are trying to solve with microservices doesn’t really line up with reality. Just to be honest - and I’ve done this before, gone from microservices to monoliths and back again. Both directions.
If you want a cheap trick to make a difference — here’s one: minimalism. Focus on the bare essentials and get rid of the rest. It’s an easy way to differentiate, because most others are doing the opposite: tons of crap.
This article is brimming with superb advice. The thing about minimalism is that it’s extremely easy to talk about doing, but difficult to put in practice. Those who master it can truly differentiate themselves.
Mihai on the value of automating as many of your project’s Quality Gates as possible.
For instance, in my projects, I have rules ranging from cosmetic matters like naming or indentation to architectural rules such as “Classes are either abstract or final” or “All variables, of any kind, should be final”.
Dan Abramov on the dangers of doing DRY wrong:
Obsessing with “clean code” and removing duplication is a phase many of us go through. When we don’t feel confident in our code, it is tempting to attach our sense of self-worth and professional pride to something that can be measured. A set of strict lint rules, a naming schema, a file structure, a lack of duplication.
First you have to learn the rule of writing software. Then you have to learn how and when to let go of the rules.
KBall, Divya, Mikeal, and Feross dig deep into refactoring. When to do it, best practices, things to watch out for, and the difference between a refactor and a rewrite. We then close out with some key pro tips.
If you’re processing large amounts of data in memory, copying data uses up RAM, but mutating data leads to bugs. Learn the design pattern that gives you safety while still reducing memory usage: interior mutability.
