Software Development Pods

One of the key responsibilities of Director of Engineering or any sort of software manager is ensuring the continuity of business.   It just so happens that no matter what you do your engineers will need to move around inside and outside the company. When people leave you are stuck with a piece of software that is not supported for bug fixes and escalated configuration questions.

As a manager your internal and external customers generally come to you for answers, but with a sizable portfolio of say 10-12 products even a reasonably technical manager can’t possibly maintain the products that lose the engineering ownership.  More importantly when you are pulled into bug fixing you lose your ability to unblock and facilitate the team’s workflow.

Recently I decided to try forming “software pods”. Pods consist of two developers and a tester.  This ensures that I have three people who know how the product works and two people who can fix bugs or deal with hot escalations.

There has been another good side effect of a pod.  It seems like folks have also started forming friendships and joint ownership of code. While these guys don’t have to do pair programming, they constantly have to merge code and talk about their respective design.

There is also a question on what kind of skill set you have in a pod.  Is it two mid-level engineers?  Is it senior and a junior?  It seems like two junior folks don’t really work.

What do you do to ensure continuity? What kind of effects have those methods have? Feel free to share via comments or over twitter @mikebz.

Node, Heroku and the joy of coding

Over the winter break I was working on one of the little projects that I use to try out cutting edge technologies.  This time I really wanted to get my deeper with Node.js, Express, Request and Heroku.

I have an old website, www.nationalvip.com,  that was basically a shopping cart for nightclub reservations. My interest in nightclubs waned and I really didn’t pay much attention to it for a while. The site still got visitors but it was developed in PHP by extending Magento.  Old code base and complicated modules killed any desire to touch that code.  I decided that I am going to change the direction of the service and make it totally informational based on open web services that are available from FourSquare, Twitter and other social services.

I am not going to spend any time talking about how to create an app using Express, Node.js and Heroku.  There are plenty of blog posts that help you get started with those technologies. I will spend some time talking about the difference in how developing and modifying a project feels.

My background is mostly with C#, Java and C++. Given my “baggage” I found the following differences in development flow pretty remarkable:

#1 Calling REST API without wrappers
Node.js and Request library make calling REST services ridiculously easy.  I generally use an API Explorers like the one from FourSquare, Mashery and DocuSign and see what elements of the request or return I need to reference. There is no need to generate proxies and maintain them.  You can visually see and get exactly what you need.

#2 Deploying using Git
Git deployment to Heroku is a game changer.  In Java days I used to sweat how I am going to FTP to my servers, remember where on a particular linux distro I need to deposit my ROOT.war and then SSH into it to bounce the tomcat.  Now pushes are seamless.  All I need to do is git push heroku master.

#3 Ability to reuse open source CSS and JavaScript using EJS.
When creating my app the default was Jade, but I really wanted to be able to reuse CSS and Javascript so I went with EJS.  JavaScript libraries, JQuery templates and other components are all over the internet.  With Jade I would have to rewrite a lot of these examples, but with EJS I was able to implement a lot of elements by just copying and pasting.

In conclusion the ability to produce and maintain an app with these new technologies is not only fast but also very pleasant.  Less time is spent configuring, updating, debugging and translating.  More time is spent creating, experimenting, measuring and having fun.