Categories
Distributed Teams Hiring Management

Hard Leadership Lesson

(Decorist : 11/18-12/19)

Challenge

In spite of multiple attempts to provide coaching over six months with repeated support and patience, realized team’s General Manager wasn’t working out as the technical peer/partner I needed for local representation.

Action

Given his importance, was wary of exiting him so did my best to coach him. After 6 months, realized the fit was never going to materialize and worked with local HR to exit him in an amicable fashion.

Then, worked with Manger’s line supervisor and Account Manager towards finding a replacement. Was delighted to find someone more technical, less traditionally represented in such roles, and seemingly eager to take on the challenge.

Worked with her for several months until she exited of her own accord.

Results

  • Replaced remote non-performant General Manager, twice.
Categories
Emails Process Site Reliability Troubleshooting

Flying Blind

(Decorist : 5/19-10/19)

Challenge

Lack of logging/monitoring (including for email sending/deliverability) made it impossible to know if integrations were affecting system/application uptime.

Action

Odd for an email marketing company: stakeholders would ask about email deliverability and engineering had no insight because no loggging/tracking had ever been instrumented.

Planned initiatve for adding integration monitoring while digging deep into application code and Amazon SES, instrumenting new features going forward, but given time and resource constratints, not retrofitting existing ones.

Results

  • Created visibility into metrics for company’s key component: email marketing.
Categories
Database Monitoring ORM Performance Engineering Troubleshooting

40s to 10s

(Decorist : 10/19-10/19)

Challenge

Business-critical page used internally and externally was taking 40s to load, then started timing out for everyone.

Action

  • Dug in, realized DB CPU Util was pegging at 100%, found and killed runaway DB process.
  • Setup alarm to be notified whenever CPU over 70%.
  • Page was still taking 40s, realized queries weren’t being logged, turned quereies on, saw LEFT OUTER JOINS across eight large tables.
  • Removed six lines of Django ORM select_related syntax without affecting page functionality.

Results

  • Dropped page load speed for critical internal Admin UX from 40s to 10s.
Categories
Distributed Teams Hiring

Needle in a Haystack

(Decorist : 9/19-9/19)

Challenge

Kept receiving candidates sourced by onsite India HR more corporate than the startup profile actually needed for the team.

Action

Posted Technical Architect, Scrum Master, and Full-stack Django Engineer JDs to Linkedin India, then screened potential candidates.

Results

  • Paid ~$100 total for well-qualified Technical Architect (4/35) and Scrum Master (12/50+) applicants.
Categories
Architecture CMS eCommerce SEO

Better SEO

(Decorist : 9/19-9/19)

Challenge

Deliver SEO value faster.

Action

Prior, the dominant in-house paradigm did not realize the potential of Django to serve in a CMS capacity.

I introduced the idea to to leverage Django as a CMS to power Landing Pages, like this one:

Results

  • Empowered Marketing to manage content and reduced time-to-delivery for Landing Pages by 30%.
Categories
Process

Env Consistency

(Decorist : 8/19-8/19)

Challenge

Since the beginning of the company, six disparate environments had organically come into being, each powered by their own DB – unnecessarily complicating testing.

Action

Introduced daily process for prod data replication with scrubbed PII propagating to other environments.

Results

  • Homogenized environments, empowering staff to use prod login on any env, greatly simplifying testing and
Categories
Building buy-in Distributed Teams Performance Engineering Process Roadmapping Strategy

Leveling Up

(Bluxome Labs : 6/18-7/18)

During the course of June and July 2018, I supported leadership (CTO/VP ENGR/Head of Platform/VP PROD/CEO) around engineering topics such at Brazilian-startup Pipefy around the codebase, Product Engineering, SDLC process, culture, and roadmap(s,) transitioning from a monolith to Service Oriented Architecture, platform strategy, scalability, maintainability, and uptime.

Among other contributions, I:

  • Coached CTO and VP ENGR around operational excellence, particularly thinking in terms of AS-IS versus TO-BE.
  • Introduced idea of maturing IT processes towards forecasting, in particular via a Capacity Plan.
  • Provided thought-leadership around managing remote teams, partly out of own experience, partly as informed by Best Practices.

Results

  • Identified strategies and tactics to qualitatively improve processes.

 

Categories
Analytics Troubleshooting

Improving Our Data Collection

(Decorist : 6/19-6/19)

Challenge

Anytime instrumentation changes were made, different engineers applied different standards of implementation, causing discrepencies in data collection.

Action

Created templatized checklist in Jira (in conjunction with Dir of Data Sci) to improve analytics instrumentation.

Results

  • Introduced checklist leading to consistent data analytics collection, growing trust with non-technical stakeholders.
Categories
Budgeting Process

Understanding Costs

(Decorist : 9/18-6/19)

Challenge

Inherited an engineering budget without a clear inventory of costs and corporate parent wanted company’s Engineering Cap/OpEx (which had never been formulated.)

Action

For whatever reason, prior to my arrival, no one paid attention to engineering costs (AWS, subscriptions, etc.)

I worked with Accounting to create and maintain a budget, revising and reviewing on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis, while also determining Cap/OpEx, and in so doing, found an allocation on P and L leading to $45K/yr savings.

Results

  • Created monthly budget giving company ability to forecast engineering costs for first time in its history.
Categories
Process Site Reliability

Preventing Business Failure

(Decorist : 5/19-5/19)

Challenge

Realized a key analytics ETL server was a crucial component of the engineering infrastructure and without redundancy.

Action

  • Crafted a plan to remediate risk.
  • Performed AWS devops necessary to bring up 2nd instance.
  • Trained-up data engineer.
  • Worked with Data Engineer and offshore Tiger Team of 2 to deliver a process for spinning up a Docker-based backup server.

Results

  • Created replacement Docker image (and recovery process) to be spun-up, ensuring business continuity in catastrophic situation.