Share
Engineering Culture
Are you improving?
Season 1, Ep. 1
•
Whether you want to be a better engineer, or you want your company to hire better engineers, the path is the same: you need to be improving. For engineers this means increasing certain skills around programming, development, and systems. For companies, it's about having the right engineering culture for your point in the company journey, and this won't be fixed i.e. you need adaptable leaders.
Becoming a better programmer is all about practice, practice, practice. Try to solve the problems on your own to begin with, without help, or AI tools.
- Advent Of Code - https://adventofcode.com/ | Join the r/adventofcode community for help if you get stuck https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/.
- Project Euler - https://projecteuler.net/
- HackerRank - https://www.hackerrank.com/
- Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Statistical analysis of the behaviours and practices used by the most successful teams.
- Good To Great by Jim Collins | The practices that may help a company to achieve initial success are not necessarily the ones that will sustain it through more advanced stages of growth. This book emphasizes the need for continuous adaptation, rigorous discipline, and a clear vision for the future.
- The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas | Developing code is more than just programming skill. Learn some of the pragmatic, soft skills needed to become a great software engineer.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman, Sussman | If developing programming skill is about practice, this classic book provides the theory to direct where to practice next.
- Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnsson, Vlissides | The classic "Gang of Four" book on common design patterns in software.
- Head First Design Patterns by Freeman, Robson | Alternative to the classic, this book uses different methods of presenting the information in a way they claim is "brain-friendly".
- The Software Engineer's Guidebook by Gergely Orosz | Helps set out the skills required for engineers at various stages in their career, up to and including management, or continuing on the individual contributor path to more strategic, company wide positions.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann | How to design distributed software systems with an eye on reliability, scalability, and maintainability, as well as many other key operational characteristics for modern internet economy services.
- Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham - https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- Why Software Is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen - https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-software-is-eating-the-world-annotated
- WCAG Compliance - https://wcag.com/resource/what-is-wcag/
- Code Golf - https://code.golf/
- I Cheated on My Microsoft Interview by Robert Sweeney [https://www.facet.net/posts/i-cheated-on-my-microsoft-interview]
- "...can't invert a binary tree..." by @mxcl [https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768]
Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com
More episodes
View all episodes
Intro to Engineering Culture
06:08||Season 0, Ep. 0Welcome to the Engineering Culture podcast! We give an overview of what the podcast is about, why you should listen to us, and plans for the future.2. Are you accountable?
30:49||Season 1, Ep. 2Long term success only comes when individuals are given clear responsibilities, and held accountable. Here we share some of the fundamental organisational decisions that create accountable teams, which are setup for success.Recommended ResourcesService Teams, as defined in the Spotify Model:Two short videos explain the basics of the Spotify model https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/03/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ and https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/09/spotify-engineering-culture-part-2/The original PDF summary, now over 10 years old https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdfYou Build It, You Run It. Extending software engineering not just to software development, but also the skills needed to run it in production.Pulumi https://www.pulumi.com/ (Infrastructure as Code)Terraform https://www.terraform.io/ (Infrastructure as Code)Cloud Development Kit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/ (Infrastructure as Code)Site Reliability Engineering by Beyer, Jones, Petoff and Murphy https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/Recommended BooksAccelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim | Recommending again, because it's so core to how high performing teams work, including T-shaped engineers.The Phoenix Project by Kim, Behr, Spafford | Fictional novel dramatising how a struggling US based business turns successful by making several people, process, and organisational changes. A pre-cursor to the next book...The DevOps Handbook by Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis | Organisational lessons for modern tech companies.Skin In The Game by Nassim Nicolas Taleb | A philosophical look at the nature of accountability.Links to items mentioned in the episodeCargo Cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult | When organisations try to make culture changes they don't understand, or don't want to see succeedThanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com3. Are you up?
26:21||Season 1, Ep. 3"It works on my computer!" is never a response you want to hear from anyone working in software. We share some of the fundamental expectations for keeping software services running, and the tools that engineers use to keep them.Recommended ResourcesThe Four Golden SignalsMonitoring Distributed Systems https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/Alerting platformsPagerDuty https://www.pagerduty.com/Splunk On-Call (formerly VictorOps) https://www.splunk.com/en_us/products/on-call.htmlOutside-in MonitoringAtlassian Statuspage https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspageCloud Monitoringfor AWS, CloudWatch https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/WhatIsCloudWatch.htmlfor GCP, Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver) https://cloud.google.com/products/operationsService MonitoringAppDynamics https://www.appdynamics.com/Datadog https://www.datadoghq.com/Grafana Cloud https://grafana.com/products/cloud/Telemetry PlatformsPrometheus https://prometheus.io/InfluxDB https://www.influxdata.com/Elastic's "ELK" Logging PlatformElasticsearch https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/Logstash https://www.elastic.co/logstash/Kibana https://www.elastic.co/kibana/Recommended BooksThe Goal by Eli Goldratt | Management book as a fictional novel. Gives the key insight that every system has a bottleneck, and the gives examples as to the implications which are useful for knowledge workers to learn. Of its time, so contains anti-DEI themes.Links to items mentioned in the episodeAWS https://aws.amazon.com/Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com/Fly.io https://fly.io/GCP https://cloud.google.com/Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com4. Are you available?
16:24||Season 1, Ep. 4Good teams know what service availability is in general. Great teams know what their service availability is specifically. Excellent teams, however, use their service availability budget to drive engineering decision making.Recommended ResourcesService Level ObjectivesDatadog Service Level Objectives https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_management/service_level_objectives/Recommended BooksSite Reliability Engineering by Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy | Foundational concepts for systems engineers, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/Links to items mentioned in the episodeAlerting on SLOs https://sre.google/workbook/alerting-on-slos/Preventing the Collapse of Civilization by Jonathan Blow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLkoZ Notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notationJonathan Blow's games are wonderfully made, and highly addictiveBraid https://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/The Witness https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com5. Are you useful?
29:00||Season 1, Ep. 5The final installment of the metadata trilogy. Yes, a secret trilogy of system monitoring! We share why engineers need to work closely with their colleagues in product, data science, design, marketing, support, and finance, because today... every company is a tech company.Recommended ResourcesData EngineeringApache Spark for MapReduce operations on Big Data https://spark.apache.org/Apache Kafka for data streaming https://kafka.apache.org/Amazon Kinesis for data streaming in AWS https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/Product Management ConceptsAARRR aka Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics https://fourweekmba.com/pirate-metrics/Diffusion of Innovations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovationsAnalyticsAdobe Analytics https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/adobe-analytics.htmlGoogle Marketing Platform (formerly Google Analytics) https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/Mixpanel https://mixpanel.com/Amplitude https://amplitude.com/BI (Business Intelligence)Microsoft Power BI https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/products/power-biTableau https://www.tableau.com/Sisense https://www.sisense.com/Snowflake https://www.snowflake.com/Columnar data stores (OLAP, not OLTP)BigQuery https://cloud.google.com/bigqueryRedshift https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/A/B TestingLaunchDarkly https://launchdarkly.com/Optimizely https://www.optimizely.com/Recommended BooksInspired by Marty Cagan | Best practices and strategies for creating successful tech products. Similar in goal and approach to this podcast, but from the product point of view, rather than engineeringThe Lean Startup by Eric Ries | Creating a new tech product under conditions of extreme uncertainty, by "validated learning"Links to items mentioned in the episodeData Science at the Command Line by Janssens | A good overview of some of the janitorial side of Data ScienceAn example of a paid marketing strategy, which could be measured using pirate metrics (AARRR). A family video clip, purchased by a company, for social media brand viral marketing https://twitter.com/Skyscanner/status/852889390661726208Final asideIf like me, you hate the idea of every single web interaction you perform being monitored for the purposes of creating better marketing profiles, to maximise cash extraction... you can take small steps to push back. Run Pi-hole as your local DNS proxy https://pi-hole.net/Thanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com6. Are you delivering?
29:19||Season 1, Ep. 6Your software could be the best in the world, but if you cannot get it in the hands of your users, failure beckons. Learn about how to deliver software efficiently with an analogy involving tea.Recommended ResourcesContinuous IntegrationAWS Codepipeline https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/Buddy https://buddy.works/GitHub Actions https://docs.github.com/en/actionsGitLab CI https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/Harness https://www.harness.io/Semaphore CI https://semaphoreci.com/Spinnaker https://spinnaker.io/CI quality toolsSonarQube https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarqube/Snyk https://snyk.io/Don't just take my word for it! Serious tech companies sharing how continuous delivery works for them.Monzo https://monzo.com/blog/2022/05/16/how-we-deploy-to-production-over-100-times-a-dayNetflix https://netflixtechblog.com/global-continuous-delivery-with-spinnaker-2a6896c23ba7Meta "We decided to move facebook.com to a quasi-continuous 'push from master' system in April 2016" https://engineering.fb.com/2017/08/31/web/rapid-release-at-massive-scale/Squeaky https://squeaky.ai/blog/development/why-we-dont-use-a-staging-environment/Recommended BooksContinuous Delivery by Humble, Farley | See also https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ContinuousDelivery.htmlSoftware Engineering at Google curated by Winters, Manshreck, Wright | Specifically Chapter 24: Continuous Delivery by Narayan, Jones, Shipe, OwensLinks to items mentioned in the episodeDORA Metrics https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performanceTest Pyramid https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.htmlMarginal Gains https://www.meaningfulhq.com/marginal-gains.htmlThanks for listening to the Engineering Culture podcast. We have no date in place for when more episodes will be available, but if you'd like to get in touch, please drop us an email to ec@lifebeyondfife.com