Teams on vnykmshr

Building from zero, twice

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve built remote engineering centers from scratch twice now. The first one grew to over two hundred people over several years. The second is eight, and it’s not clear yet whether it’ll get bigger. Different companies, different products, different scales. The process is more similar than I expected.

Starting from one

The first time, I helped set up the remote center while still at headquarters, then moved there as it grew. The second time, I was the first hire. Both times, the main engineering team was somewhere else – a team that had been working together for years.

Evidence

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A product manager pulls up a dashboard mid-meeting and the debate ends.

We had been talking for twenty minutes about whether a new feature should be prioritized. Opinions on both sides. The PM clicks, runs a query, flips the panel to a view they saved last month. The graph shows the answer. We move on.

This is not an unusual meeting. By 2021, it is every meeting.

What engineers always had

The component-level observability has been in place for years. SLOs per service. Latency histograms. Request traces that let you follow a single call across twelve systems. Error rate charts with thresholds. Per-service dashboards bookmarked by the team that owns each service.

The compiler as first reviewer

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I joined, a few of us who had recently come in would skip the daily standups. Clock in, clock out, heads down. The rest of the team wasn’t sure what we were working on. This went on for a while. We were reading the existing codebase and quietly rewriting pieces in Go – proving it could handle production before anyone had to commit to it.

That changed when Go got formally introduced. The direction came from above – Go was the language for the new services. Now it wasn’t a side experiment, it was the stack. And the PRs were coming in faster than anyone could review them all.

The war room

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

By the morning of the event, there is nothing left to prepare. The capacity plan is done. The prescale is loaded. Infra has been briefed, service owners have been briefed, the runbook has been circulated.

The traffic comes in multi-x what we had planned for.

Nothing about the plan anticipated this. The numbers we used were the best numbers we had. The headroom we carved was the headroom we could afford. Neither was enough.