CoffeeOps 04/30/2020
All Topics
- How do you decide whether or not to buy something?
- Tracing bugs back to a commit/release
- Carole Baskin - killer her husband? Whacked him?/Convince me to watch Tiger King
- How much is support worth?
- Startup financial red flags
- What do you miss most in this strange new world?
- JIRA alternatives
- Zoom fatigue
- Raspberry Pi project ideas & tips
- Blogging. Worth it?
- Agile Infrastructure redux: how to run infra teams with agile
- Has this weird world benefited your ability to do deep work (or study, etc) Has it made it harder?
- How do I figure out the right IAM & AWS account structure
- Podcasts!
Epiphanies
- 750words.com
- Remember to make the epiphanies column
- Zoom - hide self view
- If the purpose of a meeting has been achieved before the time block is over, end the meeting. Do not feel like you have to fill the time.
Blogging. Worth it?
- Background: been trying to blog for years now. Are there better ways to get information out there? Should I even bother?
- Its great to educate yourself.
- If you can put together a blog that cohesively teaches someone something, it likely has taught yourself well.
- Our blogs:
- There’s short TIL kind of posts, and then there is longer posts of in-depth stuff that teaches you something
- Writing can give you a public presence and you can get job offers, or offers to write books, guest posts, or make video series, etc.
- How do you get engaged for guest posts?
- Friends reach out asking you to write for them
- What’s your creative process?
- Just practice writing
- 750words.com
- So hard to finish a blog post if you don’t do it in a single day
Startup financial red flags
- Background: Have worked at many startups, some of which have failed. What are red flags to look for to help be vigilant
- C Suite people quitting
- Price sensitivity may or may not be
- Having to cut back or save money on things that were already agreed upon
- Easy to get blindsided by startup financial issues
- Try to find out information about runway and funding plans
- Potential warning sign would be is your business severely impacted by covid-19
- Try to ask questions, but don’t focus on it too much, since this is kind of the nature of a startup to an extent
- Sometimes even when a startup isn’t doing well is when they are acquired. You never know when you’re right next to a funding round
Has this weird world benefited your ability to do deep work (or study, etc) Has it made it harder?
- We’re not working from home, we’re working during a pandemic where you can’t leave your house
- Its an important distinction between normal working from home and this
- Possibly unpopular opinion: this has been the best working from home experience
- Having everybody be remote helps make the experience more tenable
- Once we are able to go back outside, it might make the remote work even better
- Work has been way more productive since this started
- Can be really difficult if you have a lot of people in your house and can’t get away from them
- Depends on the days. This crisis can be draining, so some days are fine and other days you’re too drained to get work done
- Zoom fatigue is real.
- There’s no real eye contact in Zoom
- “Hide Self View” in Zoom
- In a normal workplace, having a ton of meetings can be counter productive. Has that increased with our current situation?
- Think its about the same?
- More meetings to pair on work
- Fewer meetings for some because remote meetings feel more painful
- “Should have been an email”
- Fewer of just the “let’s chat” meetings
- If the meeting is over and we haven’t hit time, its still OVER. Don’t have to use the full time
Tracing bugs back to a commit/release?
- Background:
- How are you tracking bugs
- Sentry
- One warning with Sentry is be careful about what you track. Only things that are actually broken instead of just warnings
- Do you have to track it back to a specific commit? Why not just track number of incidents and bugs.
- Firehydrant
- The goal is to show that we’re getting better over time at releasing more often and introducing more bugs
- Do we track MTTR
How do I figure out the right IAM & AWS account structure?
- Work at a small company, and have no idea of how to actually do this. All the tutorials just do things in root account, but say you “shouldn’t” do that in your real account, or they assume you’re at a huge company with tons of accounts
- Should dev be a separate account? Then you have to deal with assume roles with kubernetes?
- At a past job, had a root account with AWS organizations, and then separate accounts for dev, staging, prod. Also can have an account for centralized ops things, like centralized logging and metrics, and VPC peer that with dev/staging/prod so that they all can use the centralized stuff, but without peering with each other
- Why use different accounts instead of just different vpcs?
- Better security
- Better separation
- Org-level, account level policies
- Billing tracking
- Get a consultant to come in and do it? Hard to know what you don’t know. And nobody on the team knows how to do it.
- Changing AWS account structure is super painful