Jeremy Seitz somebox

Waffle Making for Engineering Teams

The art of making waffles is very similar to the challenges in team software development. Things have to be prepared on time, and instructions have to be followed. The mixing and cooking seem fairly simple, but it's a repetative and unforgiving task, and in the end you have to ship.

As a one-person exercise, it's fairly easy. But when you scale things up, it gets complicated. Several people working together cannot simply "make waffles". They have to coordinate and divide up the work. And to make waffles for a lot of people, you need multiple waffle irons, mixing stations, and serving.

The challenge for a team is how to organize themselves into assembly steps. At one station, some engineers melt the butter, crack eggs, and mix things. At the same time, another group prepares the dry ingredients, measuring properly. The output of the two streams mus

Why NOT to Cache

I’ve worked over the years on a lot of projects, with many teams. Frontend, backend, mobile, and so forth. One topic that always comes up - caching. Developers love to talk about the topic, and are excited to add seemingly low-cost performance enhancers to their architecture and code base. However, as Martin Fowler and many others have pointed out, caching is evil. It’s one of the hardest problems in computer science to solve.

The typical pattern is to take a slow request - say, an API response - and store it in a local cache (perhaps to disk, or Redis). The implementation goes like this: the simple approach is to do a get/set cache lookup. When the user needs the data, check if it’s in the cache. If it’s not, or it has expired, then fetch the latest value and store it in the cache.

For apps, one side effect of this approach is degraded experience for some small group of users. For example, a web app needs to access a slow resource that takes 2 seconds to respond. With caching used, tha

Domain-Driven Desire: The Talk from Øredev 2016

🎥 https://vimeo.com/191051851

Links and References

Thanks for watching my talk, Domain-Driven Desire at Øredev 2016. Here's a list of resources that inspired me, and will hopefully inspire you:

Videos

Links and References

... my shameless comments added, make up your own mind :)

Videos

🎥 Agile 2016 (Dan North) - Where we are today with agile, where we can from, cross-functional, organizing, and getting it right.
🎥 Fred George on Microservices - rants, rants, rants
🎥 Microservices at NetFlix Scale - great talk
🎥 Domain-Driven Design: The Good Parts - a bit slow but good overview of DDD in practice

Tamedia Digital - Freelance Opportunities

Jeremy Seitz, Tamedia Core Engineering, Oct 2016

About Tamedia Digital and Core Engineering

Tamedia is the company behind many well-known online Swiss brands, such as 20min, Starticket, Ricardo, Doodle, Homegate, and many others. Core Engineering is a small expert tech consulting group that serves these companies, working closely with engineering teams across the company. Through project work, architecture, training, events, and providing resources, we help the companies of Tamedia bring speed and agility to their engineering efforts.

A Growing Freelance Network

One of the functions of Core Engineering is to build relationships with freelancers and tech agencies in Switzerland. We make it easier for freelancers to work with the different companies in Tamedia, through close collaboration, simplifying contract and billing processes, more flexible placement, access to services and resources, and communication with key contacts across the organizatio

Note: This is an opinionated guide. While it is most effective for on-site, the same pattern can work with remote candidates.

How To Interview Engineers

Interviewing is hard. It's not easy to find good people, and once you do, it's often difficult to find out what they can do and how they work. A badly-run interview can pass over a great engineer. Conversely, some engineers are good at passing traditional tech interviews, but bring major problems with work habits or team fit.

The first priority of any manager is to hire the best people. Everything else must wait.

Screening

UTC is best practice http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532729/daylight-saving-time-and-time-zone-best-practices
DST changes can causes issues with things like opening hours, publication dates on contracts, etc... UTC helps avoid this
embrace the pattern: UTC on systems and APIs, TZ display in UI/UX and outputs
integrations with partners, 3rd-party services (think Amazon, Google Cloud computing, pub/sub services, filepicker... all will use UTC)
you trade "easier to think about" for "subtle bugs and weird test fails" in the future
people assuming we're standard UTC like the rest of the world might set up servers/services in CEST and be off by an hour (past example: localina!)
someday you will work for a company that does things outside of Switzerland. You should learn this :)

	>>> tell me about the angles of a dodecahedron
	<think>
	Okay, so I need to figure out the angles of a dodecahedron. Hmm, first off, what exactly is a
	dodecahedron? I remember it's one of those Platonic solids, right? The prefix "dodeca" means twelve, and
	since each face is a pentagon, it must be the regular dodecahedron with 12 faces. But wait, there are
	different types, like irregular ones, but I think when people refer to a dodecahedron without specifying,
	they usually mean the regular one.

	Alright, so each face is a regular pentagon. That means all edges are equal in length and each internal
	angle of the pentagons should be the same. I recall that the interior angles of a regular polygon with n

	#include <Arduino.h>
	#include "ESP8266WiFi.h"
	#include "SPI.h"
	#include <NTPClient.h>
	#include <WiFiUdp.h>

	/*

	A large four digit 7-segment LED clock, controlled by an ESP8266.
	The LED modules are quite large, 5" tall, and require high voltage to drive the many

	# song definition

	tempo 120

	# bassline

	instrument :bass, channel: 2 do
	preset 'bass/fender_jazz_clean'
	end