Michael Morrissey

With DORA metrics, the precision matters more as the metrics matter less. It doesn't matter if the number lacks precision when it takes 30 days to get a change into production. You could be +/- 5 days, and you'd still be deploying "monthly". When you reduce this to less than a day and start measuring in hours, the lack of precision would mean the noise disguises the signal. However, you don't need to fix this as your constraint has likely moved elsewhere. #DevOps #Metrics

19

3 Comments

Unapologetically Technical's newest episode is now live! In this episode of Unapologetically Technical, I interview Hubert Dulay the author of Streaming Data Mesh and Developer Advocate at StarTree. We talked about his early experience with web backends like CORBA and SOAP and how those prepared him for data work. He shares his advice for those with web development skills to transition into data and what it's like for a person leaving a company after a long tenure there. We discuss his time at Cloudera and Confluent and how the data industry has changed over time. We talk about his recent experience with Flink and StarTree. We go in-depth into streaming data mesh, covering what it is and how to create real-time data products. We discuss the ways teams can create joined or enriched data products across domains. We round out the discussion with some tips on how to get data mesh adoption. Watch the full episode here:

10

1 Comment

tldr: I'm hiring! As many of you know, I recently joined Lattice as their SVP of Engineering and I'm excited to announce that I'm hiring for all Engineering levels and more broadly, Lattice has open roles across EPD. If you're wondering, why Lattice? The last few years have seen a step change in how we think about the meaning of work and the employer <> employee relationship - add on the fuel of AI taking our jobs and you could be forgiven for thinking the future of work looks bleak for employees. It doesn't need to be that way - here at Lattice we're building the next generation of talent tools to give employers insights and employees purpose because people matter at work. Among other things, we're using generative AI to securely analyze enormous volumes of data to unlock career insights faster and investing in building equitable feedback, compensation and employer analytics tools - not just for one company but for all companies. If you're interested in making a difference to the future of work then let's chat - all roles are remote eligible and based in the US. We have physical offices in San Francisco and NYC if you prefer the in-office environment.

324

48 Comments

Speedscale is the closest way to mimic production environments for development and testing...without actually impacting prod. But one question we get a lot is: "What about sensitive data?" 🤔 Good news, we've thought through this. Learn how we redact PII to prevent sensitive data from ever leaving your network in this blog. https://bit.ly/4dKy6RX

31

I'm having enlightening convos with folks who deliver infra for others to run. It sounds like "runbooks/wiki docs" are a real problem from a handoff/support perspective. We have an elegant solution, when you deliver runbooks as "click to play/pre-configured" Notebooks, and a command fails, the user gets an `escalation button` that shares a link to the output/metadata into the shared Slack room. It's ideal for bridging the gap when there's a support relationship. 🤓 This sounds like a case study in the making.. anyone else struggling with this?

14

Markdown to... command line app - wat? That's the topic for today's unsolicited face time. A single Pipedown pipeline can be used in numerous contexts thanks to the way it consistently accepts inputs and produces outputs. I waffled about my love of pipelines a while back: https://lnkd.in/gERrAsvA Though it's much handier to see in action! https://lnkd.in/giR-KVDT Let me know your thoughts 🚀

4

Is your observability bill out of control? Are you wasting engineering time trying to justify the cost? There's a better solution… https://hubs.la/Q02PsJZM0 #kubernetes #devops #cloud #observability

10

🚨 I took down a major piece of infrastructure as a tech lead at Yahoo! and didn’t get fired…. I think this is the nightmare scenario for engineers - to not only break your own product, but to do broader carnage to systems at the company. I think we all fear what the repercussions are if we do this. However, when intent is good, recovery is swift and learnings documented, these things are actually quite formative. When it happened, I was able to remain calm and walk through a rollback in 2 minutes, which allowed the downstream infrastructure to recover in about 10 minutes. This was also the start to my reputation as a level-headed technical leader. Good relationships with my peers in the infrastructure team allowed us to quickly diagnose that my code push was the cause of the incident and take action. I was leading a team building a very powerful piece of software. We had a client library that was installed on every server and allowed us to push out front-end code to every web property simultaneously. Code changes would propagate in about 2 minutes from push. It allowed us to provide a consistent branding, search and navigation system.  Because we understood the power of the system, we also had plans in place if something went wrong and had practiced rollback and forwards. Typically, when things went wrong, they were minor UX bugs in the interface. Medium problems cost us some dollars in search revenues. However, this time, my change had a massive impact downstream. I had added a new polling feature that worked against the caching strategy of the platform I was calling. Within 2 minutes of diagnosis I executed the rollback strategy. The bad news was the product manager had to wait a few more days for the new feature to roll again respecting the caching strategy of the platform. The good news is that we recovered quickly. I learned a few lessons from this outage: 🚨 Outages happen all the time and you will likely not lose your job if you cause one. 📝 Your team should have plans should an outage happen how you will approach debugging and recovery. ⏰ Practice for urgent situations before they occur. 🏋‍♀️ Building and maintaining strong connections with leads of systems where you have dependency is key. 🧞‍♀️ I have a special ability to appear completely calm while feeling absolute panic inside, which is a good capability to have. 

60

10 Comments

This is the initial infrastructure Tradescoop was built on. A few things have changed, some additions and removals; for example, we’ve gone from MongoDB on Digital Ocean to Mongo Atlas, Redis cloud to Memorystore, but the general appraoch remains. Simplicity. Shouts to Karl Obinna Amalu, CSM for cleaning it up and adding color ✨ #gcp #infrastructure #devops

19

1 Comment

Keep Learning New Things... Indeed, the path to efficiency requires discipline, consistency, and sacrifice. I can't believe that it is already the 3rd week of the Headstarter Fellowship! To be honest, I felt quite lazy throughout this week, with low dopamine levels. However, I'm getting back on track and am ready for the next week of the fellowship. During the previous week, I had the opportunity to work on some exciting projects: - The Pantry App Project: I focused on the Firebase backend, learning how to integrate features such as authentication, analytics, and database CRUD operations. Live: https://lnkd.in/dCGFCiH5 Github: https://lnkd.in/dWpHgc4y Pathway to Tech Event 2: Here's My Key Takeaways: Dennis Crowley: Founder of Foursquare ($150M Revenue) When asked about the ideal tech stack, He emphasized the importance of being "willing to fill in gaps." It's not just about knowing specific technologies but being able to and ready to learn. His experience on failures "People quit on themselves or quit on their startup.", reminding me to stay resilient and never quit Tariq Afaq: First Engineer at AppLovin ($30Bn IPO) Tariq's talk was packed with valuable information. when he mentioned that this field is more than just coding, like being an engineer we can solve problems under pressure and get things back on track He also mentioned that you don't need to be super intelligent to succeed. Instead, focus on creating in-depth products, being quick and responsive, and working hard. Julian Alvarez: Ex-Meta, CEO of Wisdolia ($20K+ MRR) The most energetic speaker at this event! , His thoughts on how startup founders stick to their ideas rather than believing in their team's capabilities become the reason for their failure something exceptional and new for me to learn. His startup Wisdolia— is truly something. It generates flashcards for you from any YouTube video, blog, article, or PDF. I can already see it becoming a vital part of my learning routine! Hamza Ali - CEO of Olostep I was deeply inspired by Hamza Ali's vision for Olostep, which is enabling APIs to interact with the web as humans do. It's truly a brilliant idea that showcases his commitment to shaping the future of tech. 🔗 Here's the link to the recording: https://lnkd.in/dzX6Saaz

7

3 Comments

"You can't manage you can't measure." However, the age old question of "How to measure software development productivity" has always been fickle. In the latest episode of Level Up, I had the chance to sit down with Eli Daniel, Head of Engineering at Jellyfish. We talked about why metrics are important for engineering leaders and how to select the right metrics for your organization. Spoiler: DORA isn't a one size fits all. Link to the podcast in the comments, or check it out below 👇

14

4 Comments

Got an email "GCP's Apache Kafka service is now live" at noon. After dinner, spent half an hour confirming it works well with Timeplus. I don't think you can make the bootstrap server publicly accessible. Has to setup a bastion host or run your app within the same project/VPC. Setting up the SASL username/pwd was not easy. Follow the guide carefully https://lnkd.in/gcKEVh3g and you may need to disable the iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation Anyway, if your workload are in GCP already, having such Kafka service in GCP is nice way to burn your cloud credits. Yet another Kafka vendor, great.

33

2 Comments

🚀 Discover the Future of AI: Claude 3.5 Sonnect vs. GPT-4o Are you ready for a showdown? The GenAI competition just got hotter with the arrival of Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnect. This new contender has boldly stepped up to the plate, outperforming OpenAI GPT-4o across multiple tasks. But what sets Claude apart? How fast and/or accurate is it? 🔍 Epsilla (YC S23)’s RAG Research Paper Search App: Your Ultimate Guide Imagine having a side-by-side comparison of a chatbot leveraging each technology covering 361 research papers since January 1, 2024. Epsilla’s cutting-edge app reveals the secrets hidden within these scholarly works. Claude’s lightning-fast answers or GPT-4o’s tried-and-true approach clash head-on? Who emerges victorious? You can see the results from the post below and conclude yourself. 📲 Try It Out: Explore the RAG Research Paper Search App Don’t miss this opportunity to witness the battle of the AIs. Dive into the world of knowledge graphs, speed demons, and groundbreaking research. Click the link here: https://lnkd.in/gxsN6dQp and experience the future today! 🌟 BTW, you can easily switch LLM technologies using Epsilla's no-code modular RAG-as-a-service platform, allowing greater flexibility and velocity to build your own chatbots / smart search apps within minutes at high quality, completely grounded by your own private/public knowledge of choice. Check it out at: https://epsilla.com . #genai #llm #rag #chatbot #knowledgegraph #competition #innovation

9

Clarifying how data privacy is important in the context for RAG application and the control Elastic is giving you down to the lowest data level: in Jeff Vestal's new blog post https://lnkd.in/gSAZwWJY

76

The most clear, fact-based, logically reasoned (and well-written) view on the the positive places that AI can take us from someone who really knows what he's talking about, Dario Amodei (Founder and CEO of Anthropic). This is the article I would have aspired to write if someone asked me to write about this topic. https://lnkd.in/g-xN7zRW

7

2 Comments

Just a few weeks after the GA release of Arm64 runners, we’re already seeing our clients achieve noticeable reductions in build times and lower runtime costs. If you're looking to scale your CI/CD operations and accelerate feedback loops, now is the time to explore the benefits of Arm64! Key takeaways: - ⚡ Faster build times to streamline development. - 💰 Cost savings through optimized runtimes. Ready to take your CI/CD to the next level? #CI/CD #Arm64 #DevOps #BuildOptimization #CostEfficiency #ContinuousIntegration target: https://lnkd.in/gY-_n6JJ

77

🎙️ My co-founder Ken had the pleasure of hosting Eli Daniel, Head of Engineering at Jellyfish, on his latest episode of Level Up. They dove into how to choose metrics that align perfectly with your organization’s goals, shared tips for analyzing where your team’s time is really going, discussed scaling metrics for better alignment and resource allocation, and explored why DORA metrics are just the beginning. They also delved into balancing quantitative and qualitative metrics to get a complete picture of how effective your team is. 💡 Product developers save an average of 2 hours each week thanks to OpsLevel. Imagine the impact of not being able to quantify such gains—this is where Jellyfish proves indispensable. 👉 Tune into this episode to dive deeper and uncover strategies to elevate your team's performance. Please share if you find this as exciting as we do!

22

1 Comment

How often do you hear that engineers are too focused on their input & craft? I heard that way too often in my career And like a true recovering engineer, I defended that stance…. For far too long and with way too much naïveté 5 years ago, I did stumble upon a very simple framework That changed how I perceived engineers’ influence on outcomes & impact…  Instead of obsessing on the input I am a much better leader now that framework is a key part of my toolset That framework is: → Input → Output → Outcome → Impact → Input: We all know and are quite good at the moving parts of product dev Agile sprints, standups, retros, demos, code, tech debt, architecture, roadmaps etc. 80% of us engineering leaders are very good at this part → Output: We’ve come a long way in increasing output in the last 3-4 years Releases, features, velocity, scale, reliability, patents, DORA metrics etc. fall in this category 50-60% of companies I know can do this very well → Outcomes: Many engineering departments suck at this concept Increased User adoption, Improved Customer satisfaction, Time & money saved for users, Increased user engagement, Improved system uptime all are measurable outcomes 15-30% of engineering teams/leaders think about this regularly → Impact: How are the outputs and outcomes having a real impact? On the company? On the customers? In the industry/market? Revenue growth, increase profitability, Raise new capital, Increase Market share, Save lives!, Enhanced brand are some “impacts” that come to mind <5% of engineering leaders make this a priority You get my drift… A great CTO will intentionally focus their time, and more importantly their team’s time On Outcomes and Impact And that is the recipe for a successful startup, scale-up, or even a mature software company

59

2 Comments