Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Better Tools Happy Engineers

"The only thing constant in a Startup is Change" If you aren't changing fast enough then order and complacency sets in which leads to mediocrity and you can soon become obsolete. We do biweekly releases and want to move to weekly and then daily releases. You can increase the release cadence, if you are able to automate most of the testing. But automation can't detect everything and things may break and the intent is to establish a culture of how can you prevent it but if you cant prevent it then how fast can diagnose and recover from it. For a long time I had been pushing hard for a working centralized logging and after almost an year of trying to scale the ELK framework finally our team has been able to put a fast centralized logging system that's ingesting Terabytes of log per minute from thousands of nodes in production. This weekend we deployed a major architecture change by creating swimlanes in our cloud by directing different types of traffic to di

Learning from mistakes

We should not repeat mistakes and if its the end user that is committing same mistake again and again then the UX should be changed to make it difficult for user to perform such actions. Make the user apply some cognitive thinking before he can do a detrimental action and make the action obscure. For e.g. we are a filesystem company and "Trash delete" is a detrimental action, over past few years I had several tickets where user accidentally clicked Empty trash and deleted all his files or he clicked Delete Permanently instead of Restore. He was able to do all this  because in the UX the actions are close to each other There are users who did this and immediately created tickets under panic and some even blaming that system did delete instead of restore.  I know in UI it may look bad but I have seen several companies solving this by making user think twice before invoking detrimental action like asking a captcha or make the delete and restore flow differ