My Posts

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  Stop Wasting Your Beer Money

  Why are engineers so bad at paying other engineers for their work? If we can afford spending $50 on pizza and beer for a late night of coding, then we can afford spending $50 a month for a logging service. Yet something is keeping us from just paying for that service. I believe it starts with us consistently undervaluing our own time, which leads to us undervaluing other engineers’ time.

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  What Is the Customer Impact?

  Failure is inevitable, my goal is keep customer impact costs as close to zero as possible. This means building a fault tolerant environment. Fault tolerance is different from failure avoidance: total avoidance isn’t actually possible.

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  Load Testing with Locust (Part 1)

  Load testing allows us to create artificial usage of our system that mimics real usage. To do this correctly, we want to use our existing APIs in the same manner that our clients do. This means using production logs to build realistic usage patterns. If we have not yet released our system we could analyze traffic to our test instances, demos or betas. Existing tools like Locust allow us to more easily create these test scenarios.

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  Load Testing with Locust (Part 2)

  In Part 1 we walked through setting up Locust. We ran a single instance locally and then we deployed it as a single node to Google Container Engine (GKE). In this post, we’re going leverage GKE (and Kubernetes) to deploy and run Locust in distributed mode.

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  My Journey

  Understanding the full picture, from business to infrastructure, allowed my career to accelerate at an unbelievable rate. I took the same principles I was applying at the code level and applied them to entire areas of the business, to customers usage of our software, to the sales process, to team management, to code, to delivery. I wanted to understand the entire process end-to-end and the relationships between each subprocess. This gave me a better overall view. It allowed me to communicate empathetically with all stakeholders.

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