He pasado un par de semanas de conferencia y vacaciones por lo que no he participado en el último sprint del equipo.
Cuando he vuelto, he tenido una gran satisfacción al ver que el equipo había completado casi todos los issues que se habían planificado y no habían cosas bloqueadas por mi ausencia.
A la vez he tenido algunas dudas. Si el equipo trabaja bien cuando no estoy ¿es mi rol necesario? Es una pregunta interesante ya que me ha hecho reflexionar sobre mi papel en la empresa.
Una de mis principales responsabilidades es que los ingenieros a mi cargo generen valor para el negocio. Por lo tanto la organización del trabajo es un factor clave y sobre el que quiero enfocarme el día de hoy en esta reflexión.
Qué hacer y el por qué son claves para un buen sprint. A mi me gusta que el equipo entienda la razón de las tareas, sobretodo cuando son difíciles y aún más cuando son aburridas. Si son difíciles para persistir en el esfuerzo durante el tiempo ya que sabemos a dónde queremos llegar. Y si son aburridas (temas regulatorios o reportes por ejemplo) cuál es su importancia y cómo benefician al negocio y también las oportunidades para automatizarlas y con ello transformarlas en tareas más creativas.
El balance de tipo de trabajo es muy importante para mí. Tenemos tareas inmediatas debido a fechas de entrega acordadas o imprevistos que hay que resolver. Hay metas que queremos lograr y aunque sean a largo plazo hay que trabajar en ellas poco a poco. Hay tareas de desarrollo personal que aunque no tengan un objetivo inmediato debemos crear espacios para que nuestros ingenieros mejoren sus habilidades y aprendan cosas nuevas y prueben nuevas tecnologías. Cada sprint es distinto a veces los fuegos nos pueden consumir por completo, afortunadamente no es el caso siempre y las proporciones variarán pero para mí es importante que haya una buena mezcla de tipos de trabajo.
A veces también me doy cuenta que alguien lleva mucho tiempo con un proyecto largo y se le ve cansado, pues aunque tardemos más en llegar a la meta, un sprint de “refrescamiento” suele venir bien y trabajar en otras cosas les da la oportunidad de coger fuerza y tomar un poco de perspectiva sobre dónde estamos y cómo seguir avanzando.
Por último, siendo los ingenieros que están inmersos en los detalles de la implementación intento que sean ellos que definan las tareas y próximos pasos a seguir y yo cada vez más limitarme más a desbloquearlos y que estos se alineen con los objetivos y definir los límites y consideraciones. Reconozco que esto me cuesta mucho, el no estar siempre en “modo de solución” es un reto personal.
Son los ingenieros con su esfuerzo que consiguen los objetivos y su ética de trabajo y motivación propia lo que les impulsa. Pero por el otro que tengan claro lo que hay que hacer es responsabilidad de los líderes, así que bien, punto para mi 😁.
Si has leído hasta aquí gracias por tu tiempo,
Saludos
Una de las mayores difícultades que he tenido después del cambio a una posición de gestión es la diferencia en la escala de gratificación con respecto a la que tenía por mi contribución individual (Individual Contributor).
Como ingenieros tenemos múltiples oportunidades de realizar pequeñas contribuciones en el día a día. Mezclar una rama y hacer un despliegue nos da la oportunidad de ver los resultados de nuestras acciones y su impacto durante ciclos bastante cortos. En empresas ágiles esto puede ser de días a pocas semanas. Es una generalización, ya hay mucho proyectos que pueden llevar largo tiempo para poner en producción pero suele haber oportunidades de ver el progreso que vamos consiguiendo. Ese momento que resuelves un problema y hace click! “
He tenido este post en draft durante demasiado tiempo. Empezó como una lista de 6 meses, no me gustaba y al año otro cambio y realmente como me suele pasar lo he dejado de lado por no ser ¨perfecto¨, también escribir en Castellano se me hace raro pero podría ser un cambio interesante para este blog.
Hoy está siendo un día lluvioso y tranquilo, no hay mucho que hacer, todos duermen en casa. El momento ideal vamos, así que allí va.
- El equipo es lo más importante. Debe primar el interés grupal sobre el individual.
- El trato debe ser justo e igualitario, pero no todos necesitan el mismo trato.
- Hay que entender las necesidades de cada uno de los miembros del equipo.
- Hay que ser claro con nuestras expectativas y nuestro modo de comunicarnos.
- En un ambiente multicultural es mejor ser directo y explícito.
- Cada cultura lee entre líneas cosas distintas. Hagamos visibles esas líneas.
- Aclarar nuestra posición desde el principio ayudará a evitar malos entendidos.
- Ser directo, pero bondadoso. Siempre desde el respeto.
- Si crees que te has equivocado, pide disculpas sinceramente.
- Es mejor tener una conversación difícil un momento, que pasar mil momentos difíciles.”
At work we manage a jenkins setup and rely on Google for authentication. One drawback is managing service users that do not have an email. We use those for interacting with the jenkins API in scripts.
When you use the Google Login plugin you no longer see the option to manage users in the UI, fortunately we can leverage the Jenkins Console and provision those users and generate the API tokens we need.
Let’s create some jenkins users and give them a username and password.
As programmers we spend most of our time (apart from meetings :p) editing text. I’m a very avid user of emacs. I’ve been using the editor since 2007 after a friend took the time to explain it to me. I had tried to use it at university but couldn’t understand how to use it, I tried also vim and it was even worse, so I ended up using something a bit friendlier like gedit back then. Anyway, this is not about which editor is better or worse but about sticking to something.
There are several things that will make your pair programming sessions work better. Things you can actively do and others best to avoid.
First of all, you need to give it an honest shot, especially if you’re not experienced in pairing. Pair programming is a skill and needs to be learned. Like learning any other thing the process can be tough, it can take you out of your comfort zone and get your mind resisting and wanting to do things as usual. So it’s important to be open about the experience and try to make the best of it.
I’m a big fan of magit and I’ve been using it for many years and I found some time ago the magithub extension, which is great and allows you to integrate with github, see your pull requests, open the browser for the current project, create PRs, etc.
I’ve always liked pair programming, since my college times. I remember doing coding exercises spending late nights at the computer lab and we were always working with your partners. And you would talk to everyone in the room trying to figure out how to solve things, you’d sit with people from other teams and share code. I didn’t know you’d call this pairing then.
Many companies keep their AWS accounts separated per environment, per team, etc and you can find yourself in a situation where you have users and credentials on many different accounts. From a security perspective this is not ideal as managing this can be very hard, people will change teams, leave the company, etc and cleaning up their access on all accounts can be very tedious and time consuming.
For a long time I’ve used my own command alias to navigate through my
work related projects and jump to them using the cx
Originally the x comes from Xing where I worked at the time. It also
happens that the letter x is located next to the c which makes it very
convenient like cd.
It’s been a while since I worked on the blog’s design. The design dated back to 2011 which is like an eon in Internet time and I didn’t particularly liked how it looked anymore so I decided to change it.
I normally don’t do any design work and CSS is not something I’ve enjoyed particularly but I’ve always used this space to work on that area.
Recently I’ve been using AWS Lambda at work for some projects and one of the limitations that you have is trying to use packages with compiled dependencies.
Compiling them on your machine won’t work and the “recommended” way is to start an EC2 instance and compile your dependencies there and then copy those to your machine back.
Fortunately AWS now provides a docker image for amazon linux which we can leverage to build our depencies. We can avoid launching an instance and get faster results.
This tutorial is an extraction from a talk I recently presented about docker and rails apps at the Barcelona on Rails user group. I’ll explain how to integrate docker into an existing rails app workflow.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to present a lightning talk on the Barcelona Docker Group about working with fig.
During the talk I presented a tool that is helping me focus on developing the different containers and make the changes to the Dockerfile and the apps themselves and leave out the details of using fig.
The tool is called guard-fig.
It’s been over 3 months since my change to the site operations team at Xing and time has really been flying by.
Everything is new and I really don’t know what to do many times and that I find very delightful. The investigation, learning, figuring out how to achieve something, reading forums or stack overflow and trying to fit a puzzle into your head. I think this is what I love the most about computers, that moment when you understand the machine, what it does and why it does it. It’s the hack, making the computer do what you want. Getting out of my comfort zone is helping me appreciate the basics more.
A couple months ago I started growing a vegetable garden at home with my girlfriend. It’s been a great experience. She’s always been into plants, we have lots of them around the house but never had we tried to grow food. I think the fact that I can get something out of the experience that is more than just aesthetic but also functional (I can eat the vegetables) has made it more appealing for me.
There have been some experiences so far that I somehow can relate with developing a software project.
I was invited with my friend Jean Carlos Meninno to give a presentation on the GDG DevFest Barcelona 2013. It was a great opportunity to talk about the work we’re doing recently for XING and the things we’ve been learning about developing large scale backbone applications.
Here you can find the slides: http://diasjorge.github.io/google-dev-fest-slides/
Hope you like them.
During my time working at XING I believe my single biggest contribution for the company is a side project I’ve developed called Xing scripts. This project started with a personal need for working with our development environment in a more automated way. I’m a big proponent of automating everything you can and so when I started working I realized that there were these tasks that I would do over and over again. Since I couldn’t bare doing all this manual work I started writing my own scripts.
Yesterday I was at work with a colleague and we wanted to merge a long-running branch we had. This branch was full of useless commits so we wanted to clean it up. We tried an interactive rebase but we got a lot of conflicts since git doesn’t know how to resolve merge conflicts that we had previously fixed. As you probably know this is no fun, so we did what any sane person would do and found a nice solution for this called git-rerere.
Recently I had to reinstall my computer at work since I had to update to Lion and I could only do a fresh install, so I decided to try to automate the installation process since some of my colleagues are going through the same and it seems like every time we have to waste many hours or days to solve the same issues over and over.
As a programmer, the impetus to go as fast as you can is to be taken with caution as it helps you move forward but it can also hold you back.
It is perhaps my experience but I’ve hardly had the opportunity to work on green field projects, but rather worked on legacy ones where most of the original developers were no longer part of the team or even none of them. Projects with little to no documentation and in some cases no tests at all. You probable know this feeling, it sucks, you want to do things but everything you touch breaks something else, where you obviously see that there was lack of care.
It’s been some agitated months lately for me, I quitted working at JustLanded after almost two years there and then went working for some consulting, the experience was not so great, actually it was really bad, the kind of experience that has made me learn to choose very carefully my future career moves and never again believe in marketing people. Fortunately I got an offer to work at XING offices in Barcelona, so I packed my stuff and moved there. Now this is a really good place to work, everything was as we talked, they’ve been very helpful with my relocation and the environment is great, lots of smart people that want to do a good job, so nowadays I’m very happy and enjoying my new city.
If you’ve ever forgotten to push your changes to the remote repository before trying to make a deploy, you will know that it can be really frustrating to think that everything has gone live when actually it has not. This little script will help you avoid this situations.
When using passenger with rvm I’ve had some issues with project specific gemsets, where bundler was unable to find the gems. After searching a lot I found out about using the “config/setup_load_paths.rb” file to tell passenger where to locate your gems, but then I had a new issue with rvm trying to use the system ruby instead of the ruby version of my .rvmrc file.
After going to the irc channel, I got some help that help me fixed my problem. The culprit was my rvmrc file.
As promised here are the slides for the “Conferencia Rails” workshop on process automation. Thanks to all the people that were there. I’m also releasing the redmine CLI I’ve created along with the CLI twitter client.
The presentation was created using the slideshow gem which generates an html document for you.
Slides To start the presentation just hit the “LEFT” arrow key. You can also find a pdf version here.
Hope you enjoy it.
Today I spent several hours with my friend Gleb trying to find a weird bug we we’re having importing some rss feeds.
We have a rake task that will grab an xml feed and import it to our system. When we call this rake task from the command line it would run fine, but if we run it from inside our application, we would get some wrong characters (you know, the usual ???) in the imported items.
If you’re using emacs to write your jekyll blog posts, there is a mode to help you with some common tasks. It is originally from metajack. Recently I thought it could be a nice addition to have syntax highlight support for jekyll posts, so I got my hands dirty and after some hours of lisp hacking (this was my first attempt at lisp programming) it was a reallity. It is based on nxhtml so you need it to work.
If you’re using capistrano-ext to deploy to a different server, using a custom environment, you’ve probably noticed that it always tries to run the migrations for the production environment, like this:
cd path_to_app/deploy/releases/20100309152738; rake RAILS_ENV=production db:migrateDigging through capistrano’s source I found the solution is really simple, just set the rails_env variable to the environment you want, in this example staging. So inside config/deploy/staging.rb
set :rails_env, "staging"Then when migrations get executed they’ll have RAILS_ENV=staging.
Recently I moved my blog to Jekyll, while being able to write stuff directly in my favorite editor EMACS, there was some functionality that I was missing from my previous custom blog engine, such as archives. Looking at how I could achieve this, I found Raoul Felix approach to the problem. Instead of patching jekyll, he wrote a small library that wraps around it, called jekyll_ext. Using it was really easy, and based on some of the extensions he created, I was able to provide this functionality in my site.
Although I had archives generated for me, I was still missing a way to display this information on my site, so I decided to create my own extension.
I’ve been developing some new mailers at work, and I’ve found it really helpful to be able to view the emails as they are sent to the users. So I’ve implemented a cucumber step to help me achieve that, inspired on a similar webrat step for web pages.
If you ever run into the situation where one migration doesn’t complete sucessfully, and you’re stuck with a column in a table or a new table, so you can’t drop the migration or execute the migration again, you can always call the migration methods from the console like this:
The problem we have is that this code
new Element('div', {'class':'klassName'})will work in firefox but in IE (tested on version 8) the className is never set, which was causing some problems with the elements styles.
A couple days ago I had to gather some information from a git repository, so I’m sharing this small scripts with you.
I recently had to implement some ajax pagination for a site. After googling for a while I found a solution, but I couldn’t customize the pagination url’s or I had to specify the paginator to use (will paginate’s default or mine for ajax), so I came up with this solution which fulfils all my needs.