Point Guard
The point guard role is in place for a few reasons:
- To address priority 1 bugs as fast as possible
- To protect the focus of feature-devs from various distractions
- To have consistent ability to pay down technical debt
- To give devs broad exposure to the product via bugs and debt paydown
- To give devs time to explore new ideas that could benefit the product and Kapost
- To enable skill building in debugging, triaging, and assessing risk/impact of bugs
It is a 1 week shift rotating through the team. If the new PG is OOO one week the prior PG will cover for them (if it's more than 2 days, we'll switch around the weeks)
Weekly activities:
Monday Morning: Meet with Alex and discuss current priorities of the product and the dev's interests. Plan out week.
Thursday Afternoon:
Present a code salon topic. This is meant to broaden programming horizons beyond Kapost and the revel in the joy of coding. Which is fun. Also root causes from P1s solved are presented here to complete a feedback loop on how mistakes were introduced to the codebase. Postmortem-ish (but the app isn't morte)
Ongoing: (in order of preference)
P1 Bugs:
- Solve poste-haste, possibly deploying mid-cycle
- Present root causes in Code Salon (5 Whys)
Clear out Honeybadger-created bugs by triaging:
- Write up as a human-readable bug with basic research notes on it (if impact is severe, assign to Sarah to evaluate P1 status)
- Mark as Resolved in Honeybadger and delete bug (care with this one, not always a great response to a real code error)
Deploy:
- Friday Mornings are usual
- Ensure Napa dependencies also deployed
- Watch New Relic and Honeybadger closely after deploy for unexpected impacts
Personal Initiatives:
- Improve tools
- Refactor debt code
- Explore new technologies in spikes, best if tried out in-app