Practical Technology

Strategyzer put on a free webinar to discuss how to design business experiments that matter, with David Bland & Alex Osterwalder providing the discussion.  I stumbled on these guys after being recommended the book 'Business Model Generation' (http://cuddletech.com/?p=910), and subsequently reading the follow-up book 'Value Proposition Design' ( my present CTO is encouraging VPD practices ) - plus using many of their resources. (Will add a link to the recording here when it arrives...) Big lessons When companies start seeing failure as success, culture is moving. e.g. I am so glad we learned there was nothing in this idea; we saved millions of investment dollars The ramifications of incentivizing output instead of outcome Current software development methods reward output (deliver by a certain date, deliver a feature or product) instead of rewarding the outcome This leads to focusing on building instead of learning Learn / Build / Measure loop Sta...

Lessons I have learned so far; the naivete of youth allows me to write this down...the wisdom of hindsight allows future me to laugh.  :) Building portfolio vs. delivering value This is first because it's ultimately the most important, and hardest, part to get right. Suspect that things like this are part of it: Business Model Generation/Value Proposition Design concepts being applied i.e. think hard  about what you are doing and why Continuous improvement as a cultural centerpiece Senior leadership defines the big picture, explicitly calling out continuous improvement as a necessary fact of life is key Teaching all levels to apply BMG/VPD concepts to projects Really just the act of thinking about something vs. just doing it because you're sure it's the best idea I cannot comment on how you actually solve/execute on this, but I feel very strongly that this is core to sustainable success & innovation. Systems thinking Books like 'Thinking in Sys...

I recently was asked to give a presentation on 'release' - audience: entire company.  Putting that together gave me much time to ruminate on 'what value are you delivering?'. Note:  I'm writing this as a mental exercise; working on clarifying my purpose.  Much of this is naive (and rambling) philosophy. While part of the operations department, I have been unofficially tasked with 'release management' for our dev/qa teams.  What 'release management' constitutes, I would posit, depends on your perspective of 'people, process, tools'.  Personally I fall under the 'people, process, tools - in that order' camp, so a good chunk of my focus has been on helping teams 'level up'.  Delivering value to customers (vs. products/features) and product ownership are also high on my priority list. Fundamentals Help teams grow by addressing/highlighting risk gaps (e.g. missing non-functional requirements) Help teams understand by facil...

Everyone has performance and scalability on their minds these days, so I am working on a project to bring more visibility to our bottlenecks.  The project will center around simple 'user scenarios': We send a huge batch of push notifications, and a subset of users will open the app.  That simple action actually does a bunch of stuff, like authentication, refreshing feeds, and so on. We make a change that dumps auth, and every user has to log in fresh. We add an endpoint as part of a marketing effort ( say, a news page ), and a push notification lets users know this new thing is a thing.  The endpoint gets 100k hits in 5m.  Does it survive? In all these scenarios you are dealing with read-only traffic, and nothing super fancy to put together. Nobody here really knows much about performance testing ( aside from previous experiences discovering that mass effort was not worth it, which I agree with ), so I wanted to make a point of not turning this into a beh...

About a year ago I started harping on the test automation bandwagon, and had introduced basic smoketests & New Relic Synthetics 'scripted browser' monitors (both Selenium-based).  In the spring of 2016 I used the Pluralsight course ' https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/automated-testing-framework-selenium ' to help build our inaugural UI test framework.  I wrote out a number of smoketests and 'hey this bit us on the last deploy, let's write a test for it', and the idea quickly proved itself.  Very shortly afterward we hired a QA guy specifically for automation experience, and now... He (Dan Lomanto) took the framework to a whole new level, and it's now the defacto way forward for QA More QA folk were hired, and they are now learning to use the framework to write mundane tests Some QA folk initially were 100% in the camp of 'QAs do not  write code, ever' - and now they are pushing themselves forward - learning not just our UI frame...

A lot of acronyms.  So we have a pile of IIS servers in EC2 and want to get the IIS logs into our ELK.  After much mental anguish I chose this method.  Why?  Because in our test environments you might have a bunch of IIS sites on one server, whereas in staging/production you'd only have one or two.  So having a bunch of filebeat.ymls kicking around seemed silly.  So this looks at your IIS config and dynamically creates the filebeat.yml based on those results! Here's the gist: https://gist.github.com/christrotter/143decafb217be355a93930be60d90d9 That script will generate your filebeat.yml with a prospector for each IIS site.  It adds an 'application_name' field ( part of our internal naming convention, set this to whatever ) with the site name (e.g. www.domain.com).  Ideally you'd have EC2 tags for all that, but hay.  Iteration1 and all that. It can also be run over and over (e.g. for testing config file changes); somewhat idempotent. ...

Something I've wanted to do for a looooooong time finally happened - picked up a metal lathe!  With the included tooling and the condition it was in, it was a pretty good deal, and the owner threw in a whole pile of extras when he saw I was genuinely interested/learning. This thing is ancient - 1921, the owner said - but he showed me it running, showed me projects he'd made on it.  It'll work just fine for learning - and it already works/has been restored, so don't need to invest time/$ in a restoration/repair. I am hoping to learn basic lathe operation, metrology, cutter grinding, basic tool-making, and make some neat projects/enhance existing projects. It came with: Lathe itself is a South Bend 25-Y (9" x 36") - fully restored, painted, ways in good shape, fully oiled 120v motor w. v-belts - I'll be getting some link-belts to replace them Metal table All change gears (Imperial only, but that's not surprising for a lathe this old) ...