16 ms·

Ask HN: What did you do to improve your company?

• maremmano 6y ago
  I recently read this book and found it very interesting and useful. I think it might be for you. The book is: High Output Management by Andrew Grove. It is a dated book but many of the procedures described are still valid today (obviously using real digital tools). I highly recommend you to read it. Improving a company often means improving the way people in the company work and interact while also increasing the quality of life of these people. I think many of the practices described in this book are about these very things. Good luck improving your business and sorry for my English (I'm Italian).
  • plasma 6y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation - and your English was perfect, I wouldn’t have known it was not your primary language.
• cvaidya1986 6y ago
  Everyone is in charge of ONE thing at a time. That thing being the most important thing that will make everything else easier. The One Thing is a good book.
• leipert 6y ago
  I build visualizations and dashboards from time to time, mostly to scratch my own itch / answer questions, but sometimes people have found them to be useful. For example there are dashboards to track the progress of certain tech debt we are resolving, like replacing icons (oh god that looks horrible on mobile [0]). On the process side of things, we have a lot of people reviewing code and I built this dashboard where you can see the availability of reviewers and how much reviews they have done in the past days. This might help distribute load and also allow reviewers to see when they are doing too much [1]. When we were hiring more last year, we actively looked into improving our hiring experience. That was a group effort, but Training other folks to do technical interviews was very insightful and contributed back to our process. Tech stack wise there are a few skeletons in the closet. Generally once you start digging, you find a lot of weird things. We work together to define metrics in order to assert which improvements have the highest impact. Always important to go in the right direction, little steps, and verify that you are going in the right direction. For example we focused on decreasing our JavaScript that is loading on every page, until we realized CSS cruft was blocking Rendering more than the JavaScript. Then we switched focus to that. Now after we identified what to fix, we focus on the JS again. [0]: https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/is-gitlab-pretty-yet/icons/ https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/is-gitlab-pretty-yet/icon... [1]: https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/maintainer-workload/ https://leipert-projects.gitlab.io/maintainer-workload/
• anamax 6y ago
  A long time ago, I convinced a company to put floor-to-ceiling white boards on every wall of a conference room. A not so long time ago, I convinced developers to use the automated QA system as part of their development process. The QA folks had automated almost everything, so it was much faster to test by submitting a QA job. Moreover, QA owned the metrics around performance goals, so developing to the test meant fewer surprises.
• spacemanmatt 6y ago
  I replaced our aging infra with AWS, oversaw replacement of a mishmash of C#, C++, PHP, and Java1.4 by a concise Java 11 based app, and I'm about to deploy our first PWA with a Postgres/Vert.x/OIDC backend. Legacy is still running Apache2/PHP5+MySQL. I would describe the tech stack I've inherited charitably as "nearly pure opportunity."
  • time0ut 6y ago
    What has your Vert.x experience been like? I've been using it in production for 3 years and regret selecting it.
  • _jjkk 6y ago
    Good on you for being able to focus on the opportunity. Too many developers are discouraged when inheriting a legacy app. Nobody wants to be a turd polisher, but like you said, that just means there's even more opportunity for improvement.
• BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I wrote a Copy/Paste stack tool. Pressing ctrl+c adds the current selection onto the stack and ctrl+v pastes off of the stack. You can toggle between LIFO and FIFO. It's been very helpful for our client-facing folks who have to copy a lot of user data.
  • tolbish 6y ago
    The is pretty cool and inherently useful. How do users see what's currently on the stack?
    • BitwiseFool 6y ago
      It's an inelegant solution, but the app uses a context icon in the taskbar and when you click on it a window appears that shows the stack in a table view. This is all being done using WinForms. I'm hoping to find a better implementation to be honest.
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    Windows 10 has that built in (search for "save multiple clipboard items" in the start menu), and third party ones have been available for at least 19 years (ArsClip - http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/ http://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/97/ ) Surely they have also been available on mac and Linux for as long? Can it possibly have been a good investment to write your own?
    • BitwiseFool 6y ago
      I had no idea this existed, thank you for sharing. As far as an investment of time goes, I just saw this as a challenge and I enjoyed working on it.
  • kortex 6y ago
    I started using a copy paste with history (alfred on mac). Could never go back. It's such a massive workflow optimizer I can't believe the idea isn't more common. Function fixedness?
• cpitman 6y ago
  My experience is that you can often find low hanging fruit, relatively easy changes that will have high impact. For example, I've created checklists for some of the processes that we do often, especially when it involves coordinating with a customer. Creating the initial version maybe required a few hours, but since then has been used 100's of times to shave 1-2 weeks off of work and reduce errors/surprises. Another example is really basic automation. You probably have people/teams around you that are not developers. They probably are spending time doing really basic repetitive tasks. One team I work with regularly would take a spreadsheet, then for each row create a folder and docs in Google Drive. I wrote them a Google Apps script that could do the task with a click. Not quite as impactful as the checklists, but each script like that saves someone a couple days a year.
  • c0nsumer 6y ago
    Your last example is also the sort of thing that makes people really happy. (And, unfortunately, a small number of folks will practically hate you for it, since you're taking away their "easy" work.)
  • mooreds 6y ago
    I did the same thing for a consulting company. The onboarding process involved creating and populating a google drive folder, a slack channel, and a trello board. I used Zapier to create everything off of one entry in a google spreadsheet. Tons of fun for me, saves some time for someone else, created consistency for everyone.
  • ravedave5 6y ago
    I read about a really cool way to move to having stuff automated - on here I think. You make a bash script as an interactive checklist (e.g. step 1 flip the floop then press Y to continue) and then you can automate steps one by one as time permits. You can also have a log of the steps being done then as well.
    • jameshush 6y ago
      I've done this!!! It works _great_! I have a setup script that new employees run and I never quite figured out how to automate one of the steps, so it just prints "Go to www.example.com/whatever and paste in the API key it generates below." It's been 1.5 years and it's still chuggin' along just fine.
• swanson 6y ago
  - Helped push for a shift in invoicing hourly to daily/weekly and then to "flat-rate for the whole team every month" - Organized a professional development group to promote book clubs, meetups, etc within the company - Helped marketing/sales folks update web pages to fix errors or "generic business language" - Encourage and lead efforts to use off-the-shelf tools instead of homegrown internal tools - Took meeting notes for all-hands meetings and published them internally - Build relationships with non-technical staff so that you can later give them feedback about processes they control These are some things I've done over 10 years at my company, so it's a long process!
• odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
  I left.
  • asdfman123 6y ago
    That's a large oof.
  • icedchai 6y ago
    So did it actually improve? Or did it continue to go down hill?
• idlewords 6y ago
  I raised productivity, morale, and the average skill level on my team by quitting my job.
  • theonething 6y ago
    Why do you think that was the case?
• staysaasy 6y ago
  Decide and communicate the metrics that matter for your business, then constantly educate and remind engineers of how they can help to reach those goals. Increases the number of good ideas from people with the best context and reduces the bridges-to-nowhere.
  • mdorazio 6y ago
    Be careful on this one. When not done well it quickly leads to people optimizing for metrics rather than outcomes. It's also a quick path to dark patterns.
    • staysaasy 6y ago
      Yes, it has to be done extremely carefully. Picking metrics well is one of the most important jobs of company leadership.
• ticmasta 6y ago
  I'm a Dev Manager but started as a mid-senior developer at my current company (now about 350 people). We grew a lot by acquisition and one thing I noticed was many "cultural silos" that made it hard to build a shared, unifying identity. Myself and another developer worked to try and address this with a lot of small things focused on cutting across teams & groups: a book club-style bi-weekly discussion, "Tech Talks" from across the teams to diverse audiences, some hackathons and making online conferences (MS, AWS, Google, Etc) into company events. Literally things that "make people spend time with people outside their direct team". It's been pretty successful and pushed lots of new initiatives in some unexpected areas. So my advice would be to look for a broader area where you see a gap or failing, and then look for ways to address this that don't need a huge investment of people or resources; guerilla activities FTW! If you can show some success, you can then pursue as appropriate/desired...
  • mtippett 6y ago
    I tried that - called it Tech Shorts (lightning talks) at small company. Found the largest issue was Passiveness in the engineering crowd. Ended up giving about 50% of the talks myself, not because I wanted to, but because there were so few people who were willing to step up and present. About 70% of the engineering team would attend (~50 people), so it was well received. Will try a new iteration next time. What made your attempt successful, in your opinion.
    • warent 6y ago
      This doesn't surprise me at all. The intersection of engineers and public speakers is pretty tiny. It's not recreational; it's high pressure. You need to find something fun and laidback. Something low stakes, like a semi-weekly video game competition.
      • mtippett 6y ago
        It's not high pressure, really it isn't. It's the same as when you talk in a team meeting, just more one-sided. The pressure that people feel is mostly self imposed. Most of the time the audience is there to learn given they have a gap. Most people are projecting their fear onto the presenter. Unless you are an actual leader of an organization, you are just one of the team. (I'm a reformed strong introvert)
• atlantageek 6y ago
  Worked for a SaaS that took in sales data and generated customer surveys. There were a few things I did 1. Create an easy way for support to login as a different user so that they could see what the customer sees. 2. Created a report that figured out how often each customer sends data and noticed when they were 2 standard deviations away from their average data send. We went from customers calling upset that their data is not up to date to us calling them and letting them know that they stopped sending us data.
• aj_nikhil 6y ago
  We implemented a customer support software, it was a game changer. It resolved most of the chaos.
  • ultrarunner 6y ago
    Could you say more about this? Is this an initial screening flow that formalizes customer support requests, a self-discovery tool, etc?
    • aj_nikhil 6y ago
      We used a tool called Freshdesk in which sending an email to a particular email id creates a support ticket. Also you can reply from it's dashboard. We had b2b customers who used to send a lot of queries everyday. This tool helped in distributing queries among the team. Earlier it was only one person mostly who was handling all queries, thus was overwhelmed. Also it has auto rules which can be used to set priority to the tickets. Very useful tool when you have a sizeable number of customers. It helps in providing better customer service also as very few tickets go unanswered .
      • ziyadb 6y ago
        would love to learn more about how you're using Freshdesk and the types of queries you're responding to! I'm building a customer support app that uses openAI's GPT3 to generate automated responses and it's been working great so far! How can I reach you?
• rootsudo 6y ago
  Document, host meetings, buy food, drinks and invite co-workers to have "time off" during a "work meeting" every now and then, but really documentation and generate good excuses that necessarily does not blame other departments. Document pain points is a big one, everyone says them, but not always are they fixed or prioritized. Something to fix those will work - like creating, documentation, sigh. People skills and politics, not even technical. :(
  • MatekCopatek 6y ago
    That's nothing to be sad about, quite the opposite. The longer you work in this field, the more you'll realize skills that make people "senior" are not technical most of the time.
• Breefield 6y ago
  Prior to my joining the team, our homemade migration tool used sequential versioning numbers for filenames, i.e. 001_migration_name.sql, 002_migration_name.sql. As our team was grew, it was very common to publish a PR, and right before merging realizing you had a conflict with someone else who'd merged to master ahead of you, using your sequence number. I made a small change to the system, replacing the sequence numbers with unix timestamps and added some previously non-existant tests to cover the migration utility. Unfortunately the subsequent PR took weeks to be approved by the team/eng leads because there was a lot of hand-wringing about this change. Once it was merged though we never thought about it again, it worked exactly as I'd hoped and nobody ever had to make a final "fix migration name" commit again.
  • eloff 6y ago
    I used to lose so much time to that, imagine coupling it with multi week code reviews (another process that needed to be fixed). I'm actually building a migration tool as part of a web framework (free time project). I'm going to "steal" this idea of yours if you don't mind. To play devil's advocate, probably part of the reason for the sequence number approach is so if that PR that merged ahead of you conflicts with your migration you're more likely to notice if you have to rename it. I don't think that's particularly common though, and the problem should surface when the CI build runs your migrations prior to permitting the merge to master ( a good CI setup requires you to pull master into your PR if it's out of date, which ensures the combination didn't break things.)
  • ravedave5 6y ago
    Funny my team had the same issue and I did something similar, except I went with one file per release and they would merge changes like any other code file.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• sys_64738 6y ago
  I resigned.
  • ISL 6y ago
    A note of sympathy here, as people in sibling posts seem to be seeing this choice in a negative light regarding the resign-er's self-worth or competence. Leaving can be a powerful expression of "I have tried my best, hung on as long as I can. I love this place, and I love what we do, but I cannot stay. Something is broken." It can be a hard choice, but one that sets an example for your colleagues: there are some situations which a person cannot abide ad infinitum. If the situation pushed you so far as to resign, then you made an important choice.
• ricardonunez 6y ago
  Increased pricing. Making more money per customer helped reduced the load and which helped provide a better service and it also helped get better customers.
• known 6y ago
  It's risky unless you can protect yourself from Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others)
  • bluejellybean 6y ago
    Well duh, literally everything has risk though. Your comment is effectively useless in my opinion as it adds nothing to the conversation of improving a company, you're just stating it's risky. It's risky to even get out of bed to get a coffee as you are required to manipulate people to do so! Even worse than that, you have to manipulate an entire logistics chain to get that fresh cup of joe. Just ignore that these are all free exchanges and that those poor manipulated people get paid for the work they choose to do and can tell you to piss off at any time they please.
    • Ecstatify 6y ago
      Pot. Kettle. Black.
  • muzani 6y ago
    This is true, but I see this kind of self-protection and political awareness as just another career skill. Too many people try to avoid it instead of acting against it. Or sometimes you can ignore what the company does and focus on your own craftsmanship.
• darthrupert 6y ago
  Convinced the CEO to fire the founders.
• r0s 6y ago
  I'm primarily focused on automated testing. Which is great but all revolves around test data "fixtures", standardized test data that is integrated with the system under test to be sure all the tests are using correct data. My company is large, and coordinating all this data was typically done over email or jira. I designed and built a test data API service with a web UI, now in heavy use across many departments and three business units.
• jlengrand 6y ago
  There are as many ways to improve your org as there are people working there :). Focus on what gives you energy, focuses your positivity and piggyback on it to create impact. I love tech communities, and started internal and external meetup groups, found ways to stream online, managed to get the tech blog running. All things that I love doing : making other tech people more brilliant than I am successful. Keep doing it, be consistent. After a while, it will be seen, recognized and you will be followed :). The cool thing is that because it's something you like, it doesn't sound like work! Good luck and let us know what you've found in a while !
• Nowyouknow 6y ago
  Not me, but a "startup" I'm consulting for today that's pivoted many times over the last 13 years. They spun out a different website focused on a single offering about a year and a half ago that led to them developing a focus (sales and tech both) on a specific market and has led to a crazy uptick in business. I can share the URLs if the HN community is curious to see the difference between the two. Editing to include URLs: - Original site: www.devhub.com - Spin-off: www.rallymind.com
  • tmbkr 6y ago
    Yes please.
    • Nowyouknow 6y ago
      I edited my comment to include the URLs. Interested in what you think, let me know when you have a chance to review.
  • timtamboy63 6y ago
    Would love to see this!
    • Nowyouknow 6y ago
      Edited my comment to include the URLs. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. I can try to pull some SMEs in to answer them if you'd like.
  • shadowprofile77 6y ago
    Since you consult for them, what can you honestly say about the quality of rallymind.com. I'm working on a couple of projects that will need quick, simple payment.integrated landing pages and this service looks interesting. Any opinions of them?
• rsync 6y ago
  We simplified our offering. From the beginning, rsync.net offered standard ftp service along with ssh tools. It pleased me to offer an old fashioned standard that "just worked" and allowed some weird corner cases to function for people. Simultaneously, I wanted a "clean" nmap. I wanted to see port 22 and nothing else. So, we disabled ftp (and with it, inetd on all of our FreeBSD storage arrays) and reduced our attack surface as well as the number of processes we need to run and audit. We made this change about 18 months ago...
• heymijo 6y ago
  Listened to people. The organization I worked at had no direction. Low morale. Lots of complaining. No leadership from people in management positions. A colleague and myself tried some of the things mentioned by others below to build camaraderie, etc. Minimally effective. Then, we started talking to colleagues. "What's going well?" "What challenges are you facing?" Listening alone, letting these people know their voices were heard by anyone, went a long way in building relationships, alignment, and getting things done. Then we took what we were hearing, developed an initiative, pitched it to leadership. They rubber stamped it without really paying attention or asking questions. We executed. People were shocked. Their voices had been heard, and something had been done to address common concerns they had. I don't know how to measure or describe this impact, but it's the most significant thing I have ever accomplished.
  • suprfnk 6y ago
    What was the initiative you had? The common concern that you fixed?
    • heymijo 6y ago
      This was a school/school district. The common concern was lack of direction and changing direction with new change initiative one/two/three/four times per year. We created an initiative for teacher created and led professional development. We used students for live class recreations where teachers could analyze in real time. It was coordinated, structured, and sequenced in a way no teacher's in our district had experienced. At the same time we took all of the feedback we got from every teacher we interviewed (and we interviewed all of them) and created a vision statement for both teachers and students. We took it back to the teachers and showed how each person's feedback was reflected in the vision. We got the district to adopt the vision. Then we held leadership's feet to the fire and didn't let them do anything that didn't align with the vision. We put the onus on them to explain how any decisions did align. We used the vision to design professional development, adopt curriculum, craft special education services, and more. This started as a K-6 initiative, which was wildly ambitious at the time. In the following years the middle school got on board, and then the high school followed suit, led not by administrators but by the teachers themselves. Something we never in our wildest dreams thought would happen. Five years on the direction is the same and positive change continues.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  Figuring out where the most time is wasted. About 1/5 of my job is chasing SQL queries that didn't get run in some environment. I keep pushing for active tracking of which queries have been run where to try and eliminate that.
  • faceruler 6y ago
    I was in the same boat about 10 years ago. I wasted time confirming that sql scripts were deployed to different production databases. I needed to chase down logs and contact dba's through email, etc... It was a big time-waster. My team created a standard adhoc script template to help with this. The goal of the template was: 1) confirm script is deployed to the correct database 2) inserts record into log table (start date, end date, description, etc...) 3) updates log table when script completes / fails We asked the script runners / dba's to reject any script that doesn't use the standard template. They reviewed and contributed to the template and were totally onboard. The majority of our script writers use sql prompt, which allows for sql snippets - so everyone is used to starting out with this standard template as they write these scripts. No issues since we implemented this. And I can confirm when and where scripts ran quickly.
• giantg2 6y ago
  I've created scripts to automate some repetitive or complex tasks. I've done this for two teams. I think it was an improvement since it eliminated human errors and freed up developer time. Some of the other developers appreciated it, but most people didn't really care. I also came up with an architectural improvement not used anywhere else in the company that allowed us to close a security vulnerability related to a file copy process. I think the tech lead and the manager who owned the vulnerability were happy. Nobody else cared. I think these types of improvements are fairly common and add up to great things, especially when multiple people have this mindset. Unfortunately in my experience most people don't have that mindset because it's not part of the culture where I work. Don't hold your breath for recognition or appreciation. The only way to achieve that is by improving something for the 'business people'.
• laughingpine 6y ago
  I am lucky in that fact that I am a position where my opinions are listened to and respected. I have spent the last few years trying to improve a number of our processes. If I wasn't in this position, then chances are I would have moved on to greener pastures almost immediately. Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices disciplined code management. When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the code. Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were scattered on different people's PCs. After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices. There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.
• time0ut 6y ago
  Pushed for everything to be code checked into source control. The application code, scripts, tools, migrations, documentation, alerts, tests are all code artifacts that get versioned, reviewed, scanned, deployed, executed automatically. Working on infrastructure still.
• ryaan_anthony 6y ago
  I organized a cookie swap. There are dozens of process improvements and internal efforts that I've had success with but the cookie swap is my favorite story. Without some culture, work is work.
  • unspecified 6y ago
    I would love to exchange browser state with my coworkers and act as them for a few hours. I think I could really clean up our ticketing system if I was logged in as someone who could outright delete tickets instead of merely marking them as closed.
• notdonspaulding 6y ago
  My general advice for anyone who has a little spare time at work and is looking for how to improve their company but doesn't know where to start is: Take out the garbage. By which I mean, everybody has a part of their job that they just don't like to do. It's a necessary chore, but not fun or interesting or exciting in any way. Look around you for that kind of work that's already being done by your management or your peers. Take that task off of their plate (most folks will gladly give it to you) and do it for a while, and then see if there's a way to eliminate it, automate it, or otherwise improve the experience of doing the job. Especially as a software person, the amount of power you have to take little parts of the business that are rough and make them smooth is tremendous. Taking out the garbage is just an easy way to get started helping out. I'll say this also applies to your first few weeks/months in a new codebase. Find the little problems that everyone else is ignoring because they have bigger things to worry about and tackle those for them. Beyond being helpful to the team, it helps you learn the territory of the codebase more quickly than you otherwise would.
  • ISL 6y ago
    As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin. Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my career and our team's success.
    • nurettin 6y ago
      this is true, I've seen someone here lamenting about how people changed his callback code to async while he was adding new functionality which resulted in him changing jobs.
    • stack_underflow 6y ago
      I'll second this with a personal anecdote as well. If you do want to do this, clear it explicitly with your manager/person doing your perf reviews... I had a non-technical manager who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features and received a negative review because of it, even after explaining the situation.
• oyebenny 6y ago
  Gain a lot of capital.
• cjvirtucio 6y ago
  Fully automated a process that I had zero domain knowledge on.
• jasonlotito 6y ago
  Helped build, grow, and maintain a hackathon. Over the course of 8 years, we've held 21 hackathons. Some have been more successful than others. One of the things I've always done is protect the underlying goal: that it's 2-days the company gives for people to work on whatever they want. People have used this time to make furniture, work on games, learn new technology, and of course, work on new products or tools for the company. You do NOT have to present. While not all hackathons have produce production level ideas, many have. One hackathon resulted in the initial iteration of the biggest product shift in our company. One that I'm incredibly proud of. This might not be what you were asking for, but I know for a fact that doing this literally had the most impact on the company.
• jedberg 6y ago
  At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Cutting deployment time makes a huge impact because it makes everything go faster. You can iterate faster, which means getting bugs fixed faster, getting data to product managers faster, etc. It also has an effect on reliability. The faster you can make changes, the faster you can fix errors (as long as you aren't introducing them faster too!). It's always the first thing I focus on.
  • Elixyrs 6y ago
    > At one of my jobs, the very first thing I did when I arrived was redo the code deployment system to get the deploys from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. We have the exact same issue in my company. Could you explain how you managed this?
    • jedberg 6y ago
      The way I did it then probably wouldn't work now. I literally just wrote a perl script to automate pushing copies out to all the servers. They were doing all by hand before I got there. If I had to do it today, I'd be looking at GitHub actions or some other similar CI/CD tool. If you're already using those, then I'd ask what is the slowest part of the process, and how can we speed it up? To answer that question you obviously first need telemetry and monitoring to track each step of deployment. That telemetry will be useful in not only finding slow spots but tracking your improvement, which will help you both in operating as well as justifying your work to others.
• axegon_ 6y ago
  1. Simplify - as a rule of thumb, if something looks too complicated it probably is. If you think there are too much "ifs" in the code, there certainly are. 2. Remove any "shiny-new-toy". A perfect example would be my bank, which operates in ~15-20 countries: Their interface isn't a shiny web interface with pretty animations to cover up a slow response time. The interface all employees use is built with ncurses. That speaks volumes. 3. Profiling the code and by doing so find unnecessary bottlenecks. 4. Never blindly reinvent the wheel. If a solution looks absurd but is highly used, chances are the solution is there to cover an edge case. Ask before you decide to "fix" it.
  • gmadsen 6y ago
    i feel like there is an appropriate middle ground somewhere between "shiny-new-toy" and ncurses...
    • grandinj 6y ago
      It's probably a 15+ year old application, which, if it was web-based, would be built on 2-3 out-of-date webstacks, badly joined together, with who knows how many security flaws. Compared to maintaining that, ncurses doesn't sound too bad.
    • lemoid 6y ago
      True. I used to provide dev teams with cli tools (testing, infrastructure debugging, etc.). They used them from time to time but only after implementing basic gui with tkinter or simple html/js/css they started to use them more often. I prefer terminal more than gui but if you don't use terminal 90% of the time it's much easier to click the button on a website.
    • c0l0 6y ago
      You are right - that's ncursesw ;)
    • axegon_ 6y ago
      Hypothetically... Late 90's web, which wasn't bloated with 150mb javascript files which run your CPU at 10000000%...
• sokoloff 6y ago
  From 2003-2005: Co-created our database release process, integrated it with our code release process, developed our production problem management process, and built a bunch of our production monitoring tools. Many of those things have since been superseded in the intervening 15 years, but it still pleases me to walk by the NOC and see tools of mine that I wrote 10-15 years ago still running (now maintained by others, but still running). One of the most useful and longest-lived tools is one of the simplest (I literally built the essence of it in 4 hours, 6-10 PM one evening). It graphs a timeline, 1 second per pixel in X, logarithmic dollar value in Y, plot every order. That was the first version. It's since evolved to have a bunch of per-minute summary data on the screen (AOV, CR%, errors/info/warning/404s, total bookings, paid vs unpaid orders, database connections in use, idle connections available, long-running transactions, long-running pages, etc per minute), records to a database, so you can "playback" outages or go exploring, etc. It's not the best tool for deep digging, but when you want a fast-reacting, "quick check" that the entire site is working post-release or post-outage, it's unambiguous that people are getting all the way through checkout (or not). You might be surprised what you can learn from such a simplistic tool.
• dnw 6y ago
  Since you said you’re long, recognize compounding is really powerful so focus on small but consistent improvements. You won’t feel like you’re moving mountains and you will start seeing things improve quickly. To start the process I’d say it doesn’t matter what you focus on but it’s important to do something and then show it did improve something. Subsequently help people do what you did, don’t be the only person doing this. More specific things that have helped us in the past: -Do establish a habit of looking back and asking what could have been done better, we will do differently, and what we need to fix now. Important thing here is, fix at lest one or two small things that people identified. Make this a habit for everything, even small meetings or decisions. - Try to get people to understand _why_ they are doing what they do. Building a feature? Break it down to first order impact (why our customers need it or what we are going to learn from doing this). Get people to understand the business company is in, more than the solutions people build everyday. Start small, with bugs, for example instead of features. - Create transparency, building on top of the above see if the senior team can share business numbers/success/failures. This helps build purpose and trust among people.
• christophilus 6y ago
  Saved about $100k / year by switching to our own video transcoder service rather than outsourcing it to SaaS.
  • cwxm 6y ago
    how many dev hours did it take to build it and how many dev hours / year does it currently take to maintain/update it?
    • christophilus 6y ago
      One person, maybe two weeks to build it. Not sure yet on maintenance. But certainly not $100k.
• nicbou 6y ago
  I implement a few changes wherever I work: - Commit messages must include a ticket number (or a keyword like "hotfix"). This is enforced by a commit hook that's bundled with the project. - Ticket templates that encourage clear tickets. A ticket should always explain why it must be done. It should also contain enough information for any team member to judge its priority, or start work on it. - Any relevant discussion about a ticket should be in the ticket. Just enforcing this makes a world of difference. It ties every bit of code to a justification. This way, if you decide to rewrite the project, you won't end up losing years of discussions and important lessons. You'll also have a much easier time prioritising and assigning tasks, since everyone knows what they mean. Aside from that: - My first pull request at a company is usually an update to the README file. It rarely matches how you actually use the project. - I write "recipes" for common tasks (lint, deploy, test...). This way, you know that the CI system and every developer in the team performs those tasks in the same way. You can change the recipes, but they are always called with the same command. "scripts/clear-cache" is also easier to memorise than "docker-compose exec backend rm -rf /var/cache...". - Add :party_parrot: to Slack
  • snypox 6y ago
    Are you me?! Even the party parrot emoji.
    • nicbou 6y ago
      Maybe? Do you get a weird feeling in your right elbow when you apply cold water to it?
• mierzwin 6y ago
  I left.
• bschne 6y ago
  Not necessarily limited to development roles, I feel like in every team/company, there are these pesky sources of friction that everyone has sort of learnt to live with because in the short run, taking the few extra steps to work around something is usually quicker than facing the actual problem. Actively push to remedy these, whether it's something you can take care of yourself in a few hours/days, or you need to campaign to get someone's buy-in. It goes a long way - not only in time saved, but also in mental capacity freed up. This can be code, build systems (or lack thereof), missing automation, or even lack of clarity between various stakeholders.
• ncphillips 6y ago
  After reading Shape Up by Ryan Singer we decided to try it out. It's been incredible improvement. We are now able to focus deeply on hard problems, take guilt-free time to rest and sharpen our skills, and regularly think long term about the direction of our work. I just wrote about about it in-depth on my blog: https://ncphi.dev/blog/implementing-shape-up https://ncphi.dev/blog/implementing-shape-up
• kempbellt 6y ago
  I left. The people were decent and the product fine, but my personal interest in the company went from "eh, sounds kind of interesting" to "why am I here...?" very quickly, and every day felt like an uphill battle to not rub my disinterest off on my coworkers. Looking for inspiration is a mind trap that is best avoided. Inspiration comes when you are silent and you listen to yourself (and those around you). Keep an open mind. What you feel inspired to do may take you in a very different direction than you expect. Maybe the company doesn't need a new tech stack optimization, but would benefit greatly from a BBQ in the park - also no better time to get to know the people you work with better than when they are not sitting at a desk. If you want to improve your company, listen. That's all there is to it. Listen to the needs of the people you work along side and then answer those needs. You are a part of a small tribe and that tribe values and benefits from active listeners and naturally inspired contributors. Forceful inspiration typically has an opposite effect, so be mindful of your underlying drive.
  • adam_ellsworth 6y ago
    What Dev resources (blogs/books/etc) could you recommend that could help better explain this mode of thinking and how to turn it into a practical and practicable methodology of working?
    • theemptiness 6y ago
      I'll suggest Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (for empathy) and Pirsig's Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for quality and values).
      • maerF0x0 6y ago
        Massive upvote for Pirsig. I did not understand Apple until reading this book. I think Tesla maybe our contemporary equivalent.
        • someperson 6y ago
          Can you please explain in a paragraph what this book made you understand about Apple?
• DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  Little different swing on things, but I'm an industrial engineer focused on improving factory performance. And a lot of that is simply building and refreshing reports. Often Excel, sometimes Access SQL, and occasionally R scripts. It's not particularly glamorous, but it truly does drive business decisions which neat to see. Every time I start a new role, I write up detailed standard work for the processes and make notes of what can be improved. As time allows, I make those improvements. I also keep rough track of how long each update takes, so if I have 20 minutes before a meeting I can start and finish a task. This helps me on performance reviews because I can objectively say "I removed 1 FTE worth of report updating, creating ongoing cost savings". The productivity gains are amazing. Over time, reports become fully automated. Logging improves, helping trace down errors. What used to be 8 hours per week of report updating becomes 20 minutes of validating data. It's 10x easier to take a week off if your tasks are documented. I routinely write up a process then make another team member do it, so I can find the weakesses and fix them. This helps the bus number, and makes it easy for someone to cover for me if needed.
• btgeekboy 6y ago
  When I started at a previous company, we scored almost 0 on the Joel Test. (Remember that?) By the time I left, we were at close to 100%.
  • Lordarminius 6y ago
    Its only one google search away but ... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... You're welcome.
• aprdm 6y ago
  I have done two big devops transformations so far in two different companies.. from manual deployments and no CI to CI/CD + infrastructure as code. For me it usually goes with: 1. Have people trust you by usually executing a big project. For me it went by executing very well small projects and getting bigger projects until you're implementing a very big and critical project with a team. 2. Once you have executed (1) people usually trust or know you. Then you can start talking with people across the entire organization asking what hurts the most, make some list of things that are interesting to tackle and who would be the stakeholders 3. Choose one from the list of (2) and do it (or try to sell the need for it)! More often than not it involves a lot of conversation, empathy, teaching.. for example, if you want to implement CI/CD then be ready to: a. Sell the value of tests b. Teach best practices for testing c. Have a skeleton project that people can easily copy d. Have some tools to easily set up a Ci/CD for a project following the structure of (c) e. Adjust notifications and workflows And.. you have Ci/CD for a group. Now do the same for all other groups. Now your company has CI/CD, yey! Pick another item from (2)
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  Encourage a culture of yes-ness and helpfulness. It’s so easy for people to say why something cannot or should not be done. It’s so much healthier to say “yes, I trust that you need what you say you need but I need more information to be able to help you.”
• brailsafe 6y ago
  I advocated at my own risk to try and improve our working conditions. Being honest and carrying out my work in the way I was most comfortable doing, directly and assertively asking for better physical and social conditions to perform our duties, and using my own equipment where theirs was a hindrance. The tech stack was relatively ancient, but I accepted that as part of the role, because it wouldn't have improved much of anything to swap YUI for another. Anyway, I learned after I was fired that our group cubes were replaced by something less soul crushing and more configurable, the sales guy who screamed on his bluetooth headset every hour while typing on his mechanical keyboard was moved, and the guy in charge of the failed project I was assigned to was promoted. So honestly idgaf about improving whatever company I'm at anymore. I just try and pick one that will not suck so bad and plan to stick around for 6 months.
• spondyl 6y ago
  At a previous employer, we had an incident management bot that was pretty widely used by product teams but for whatever reason, the actual data just sat in a Redis instance (the default Hubot adaptor out of the box) and was never looked at The data was mostly a mess as the bot had interfaced with Flowdock at one point and later Slack, but even then Slack had undergone a few changes to the message schema. All up, there were about 4 different distinct schemas. To be clear, what was stored was the representation of an incident that also included data about the person who commanded the incident. Generally the commander data was just a copy of their profile data, and that was the thing that mostly changed over time. Anyway, one of my first tasks when I joined was to throw together a small web API to expose that data so we could generate reports and what not. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that nothing I did actually drove any particular change. I just got lucky because when our new CTO joined and started asking product teams how many incidents they often had, product teams started asking our group for reports. Seeing how much time my manager was spending generating these things, I took the next logical step of throwing together a basic UI (filtering, sorting, exporting to CSV) so that it inverted the overhead onto the teams themselves rather than it being bottlenecked by one or two people doing reports. Anyway, there's more to it than that, and funnily enough no one in our wider team was really aware of what I put together. Having said that, it was a fun experience and kinda nice getting a little bit of attention for a while. It was more or less a side project so I got to field customer requests (and treat users like customers), balance priorities and so on I guess the theme here would be a mix of visibility and automating toil? --- I've often thought about doing a New Old Thing style postmortem on that bot. It was rewritten a little while ago now but the first version, using the default hubot adaptor, made me really appreciate Redis. It was doing some highly uestionable stuff under the hood but as a testament to Redis, it never missed a beat.
• lsb 6y ago
  Introduced async Slack stand-ups, introduced containerized artifact-based deploys, massively reduced scope and time of several engineering projects by relaxing constraints (uptime, generality, etc)
• lame88 6y ago
  Specifically, performance optimizations and reliability improvements. More generally, applying my most unique and valuable skill set compared to the people I work with and advocating for good design decisions toward those ends.
• OliverJones 6y ago
  I joined a small SaaS company when it was 15 years old, in the role of developer. I was the third developer on the team. I dragged them, kicking and screaming, away from CVS into git for source control. I did a LOT of documentation of their ancient and honorable :-) SQL schema. I converted a lot of old legacy code to more modern languages. I converted a lot of old legacy SQL embedded in their code to use prepared statements and stored procedures, and developed a tiny little framework to make it easy for other developers to do the same. I came in early one summer morning and washed the windows in the office. Seriously. They hadn't been washed for 15 years, and were disgusting. I helped talk them into replacing their low end home brew bug tracking system. I pushed, hard, to get them to gradually discontinue using FreeBSD in favor of standardized Linux cloud distros. I developed a way for sales, dev, and ops to communicate to do capacity planning BEFORE bringing on new gigantic enterprise customers, not after. I failed to get them to adopt CI/CD. I retired. My working principle: always work myself out of any job. Do all my work so somebody else can take it over.
• contingencies 6y ago
  Fire early, fire often.
• laudable-logic 6y ago
  I make sure I'm up for _anything_. Give me that thing that has been the thorn in everyone's side. Yes, some rather daunting (read: frought-with-peril) tasks present themselves, but... if done well, usually yield a better 'next assignment'.
• cdnsteve 6y ago
  Take ownership and fix issues, make this a habbit and do it often, not a one-time situation. Depending on your role this can be code level, architecture, people related, hiring, manual processes, etc. The best signal is the thing most people are frustrated with but never seem to find time to get to. As you move up in your career you will be faced with more difficult problems and challenges, especially those with no clear answers or path to follow.
• muzani 6y ago
  C1: I was the person with attention to detail. One guy built the system and led things. I spotted cracks in it, and patched it to be stable, then proposed a better system when they needed one. C2: I was the "living documentation" for the entire system. There was plenty of docs, gigabytes of it in fact. Too much for most developers to know by heart. My job was to actually read it all and answer questions. I'd bring up things like how this portion is not optimized according to this specification here, or that portion is missing error handling N, which happens frequently, or this other server fallback is not being used. The system has millions of daily active users, so every time an API is called twice, that costs serious money. I'd also spot things like unstable hacks that were hidden in the code by some old programmers. C3: Whole code was a mess. I spent half my time refactoring it, which also meant a few late nights sometimes, and chopping out thousands of lines of code a week. It cut down maintenance and bugs drastically. Where one thing would require 4 hours to do, it then required 10 minutes.
• fuzzfactor 6y ago
  I do something every day that no one else is doing for the clients.
• ojciecczas 6y ago
  I decreased required HDDs size by 20% in CI system by adding "-ntp" switch to all maven commands. It makes the maven stop printing "Downloading..." when it downloads artifacts. How I did it? I added alias mvn=mvn -ntp in .bashrc.
• takinola 6y ago
  There are a couple ways to approach this problem. One of them is to examine the outcomes that are crucial to the business and recursively working backwards to the components that drive that outcome for the business. Once you get to the root inputs, you will be able to identify which changes will create the greatest increase in your desired outcome. For example, let's say your company is a SaaS business that is number 4 or 5 in its market and is looking to move up to number 1 or 2 position, then you may find that the key strategy to get there (just spitballing here) is to get to feature parity with the market leaders. If so, then you would need to launch more features faster. How do you launch features faster? Well, could be improving the code quality so there is less rework, building better tools, hiring more devs, etc? So lets take one of those, eg improving code quality. How do you improve code quality? Well, maybe hire better devs, train the devs you have or improve your QA processes? If your devs are all rockstars, then it must be QA that sucks. So let's look into how to improve QA.... (etc) Keeping working down this logical path and you will arrive at the most impactful changes you can make in your organization.
• sowhat_alex 6y ago
  Improve the culture. Processes, tech stack, productivity, these are just tasks. If there is a culture of continuous improvement then those tasks are always being improved. Better is not a destination, it is the journey.