engineering

Skilled and talented engineering teams often become “known” for the solution they provide successfully to customers. This is dangerous. Impact to customer value Once an engineering team comes to identify themselves with their solution, they inadvertently try to fit and adapt the problem to the solution, instead of the other way around. More worryingly, teams tend to discount better alternate solutions, even if they fit the problem better. Reasons given are higher amount of time to solve, unknown unknowns, low skills etc....

Software as a Service (SaaS) business is unlike .COM, which provided internet based alternatives for conducting commerce (example: Amazon), auctions (example: eBay), travel (example: Expedia), and finance (example: E*TRADE) using desktop browsers initially, and now using mobile applications. SaaS is a paradigm shift in the implementation, delivery and usage of software applications. SaaS uses two ways to distribute software applications: Web apps: use the public internet to deliver software to users, making delivery costs close to zero Mobile apps: use proprietary app stores, which slap on extra penalty of 30%....

Setting up devops is a learning journey for most programmers. Early in my engineering career, before cloud computing was invented, making my programs work in my company’s datacenter could be summed up as making the program: configurable: by having no hardcoded paths and secrets in the code, supporting feature flags (both static - which were driven through property files, and dynamic - driven through databases) deployable: in different machines other than mine....

At work, I am navigating the middle management rung of the corporate ladder. My job requires managing up, down, and sideways. The quarterly 1:1 check in document is a tool I use to align my teams work towards meaningful outcomes for business customers and share holders. Every quarter, I ask people to write, share and review (with me) a document with answers to the following questions: What outcomes (in the past quarter) were delivered for the business and users?...

I have built and operated software development platforms in multiple industries for over two decades. A 1:1 discussion inspired this blog post. Software development platforms allow product development teams to deliver features in less time, with high security, reliability, performance, and built in compliance. Unfortunately, in the long haul, this turns out to be a two edged sword. As these platforms age, they tend to become monolithic (more code, less modular), and more complex (offering too many configuration options, feature flags)....

Silicon Valley is a hotbed of technology innovation, scrappy startups, and has seen the rise of a few lucky startups to be worldwide industry titans. Most innovations try to solve problems cheaper, faster and better. I immigrated to the US, and Silicon Valley at the end of the dotcom boom cycle (just before 2000). And shortly after that, America as a super power went through a generational transformation with the shocking terrorism attacks of 9/11....

I have set up engineering teams many times in my career. Each time is unique, and it is fascinating to observe a new team building its own micro culture and character. Cloud Application Management (CAM) is a brand new platform engineering team that provides services to manage platform extension applications. A customer or the application author decides: which configurations need to be changed for their solution what data sources are required what processing is required for the new data whether to list the application in application registry or keep it private An administrator installs, upgrades or removes an application on their cloud solution....

Earlier this year, I got an opportunity to work on an existing cloud provisioning automation effort that wasn’t going as well as leadership had hoped for. This was puzzling, as there is no shortage of scripting, APIs, and 3rd party tools available for automated cloud provisioning. Public cloud providers go out of their way in helping (for obvious reasons) corporations ramp up to their cloud offerings in an automated way. The platform teams that were tasked with this effort were also reasonably smart, motivated, and the goals they were shooting for felt reasonable and well thought out....

Our journey through life is a pathway created through the decisions that we make. Most non trivial decisions are costly and or impossible to revert. It is no wonder then that “undo” is a valued super power when working on complex software systems. The ability to reverse a decision completely (and without lingering side effects) in a given context is magical and godlike. Undo makes users of a software system more confident in exploring new features and options, as “undo” always provides a lifeline....

I previously discussed software feature scope in Quality, time, scope: pick any two. scope skōp noun: scope; plural noun: scopes the extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with or to which it is relevant. “we widened the scope of our investigation” Please keep in mind that we are addressing scope in a narrow sense of developing features for software distributed through the magical powers of the “zero additional” cost internet (after the recurring costs of connectivity, bandwidth, and access device)....