I was recently participating in managers workshop at my current company Mash. One of the learnings was about employee development plans. Please find below the key points that in my opinion should be always considered when crating development plans.

Not everyone needs a development plan​

Many employees may feel good at they current position. It is not always appropriate to push for more. People may want to specialize at their current role and may be doing a great job in this role. Managers should not be pushing for "next" levels. Especially if it requires to change focus to other things. Not everyone who is a great engineer would be a great team leader or great designer. Adding new responsibilities may affect ability to continue the great work that given person is currently doing.

There are moments in career that people may actually want to change something and this is a proper moment to have a development plan which would support employee in reaching next personal goals. But it most cases it is far more important for employee to be able to fully engage in the current role. Development plans should be not a replacement for that.

Where the development happens?​

If everything is working well in our workplace, here is where learning happens:

• 70% of the learning comes from everyday tasks
• 20% from colleagues (peers or mentors/leaders)
• 10% from external sources like formal training, conferences or books - that are  great ways to get some initial knowledge but what makes an expert is practice and solving real problems, not reading articles.

This division should be also considered when designing development plan. Employee may spend many days at conferences but if everyday work is not giving opportunities to develop and use that knowledge - then development activities are far from being effective.

Who needs a development plan?​

When preparing development plans, first think about poor performers. They may need extra attention to help them reaching expectations. Employees may perform below expectations because they did not have enough internal training and knowledge sharing to be able to carry on assigned tasks. If all the necessary knowledge sharing was done and there is still no improvement, then employee improvement plan should be discussed instead of development plan.

Also remember about your "rocks stars". They usually also need extra attention to make sure that they have enough challenges to grow even bigger.

The most important is to listen to your team members to know what they really need. Development plans should be an outcome of real needs and expectations. As all other things in teamwork - it should not be based on assumptions.

What is DNA?​

DNA comes from Polish name "Droga Nowoczesnego Architekta" - it means: "The road of modern architect". English abbreviation would be "TROMA". This one of very little examples where Polish is simpler than English ;)

This is a 19-weeks course crated by 3 experienced architects who are also trainers. They are supported by popular blogger Maciej Aniserowicz who is the publisher of the course. He made the program well known thanks to the broad IT audience in Poland following his devstyle.pl blog and social media channels.

Course is dedicated to senior software developers and architects. The goal is to propagate modern patterns in software development. Presented theory is backed up by cases from real-life. It is meant to be the "killing feature" of the course. In addition to that there are also practical exercises after each week. The idea is  that participants get not only theory but also examples from real life and exercises to practice.

Visit droga.dev to learn more about DNA.

First impressions​

I was following more ore less what was published by DNA mentors as "teasers" in recent weeks before full program became available. I was prepared to expect good content and I was not disappointed. The content is solid and also the way of presenting it is fully professional.

Good content was not a surprise for me after buying access to the course. I believed that those guys will do great stuff. I knew what I am buying. When you go to good restaurant you expect to get good food, no excitement here. But there was one thing that was a bonus that I was not expecting to be so meaningful: the community.

Joining DNA community on Slack was pure fresh excitement. This is a closed group for all course members. Joining this group was like joining tens of new teams in different companies in one day. People share and discuss how they approach various topics in their projects. This is great, tons of information and different points of view! You can read about an useful tool, online resource or interesting approach to specific problem. I expect that the value of content generated by the community may exceed the value of the course content itself as the time goes. Of course it's Slack so no structure is present here and it will be impossible to find anything after couple of weeks ;-) But among all possible distractions you can have turned on, this Slack community is the beneficial one and can really broaden your mind

Eye opener #1​

I like to search for analogies between constructions and software industry. In general there is a lot of analogy, but one of them seemed harmful to me: software developer is a creative role whereas constructions developer most often is doing a repetitive job based on detailed project. DNA explained that discrepancy - software developer should not be treated as construction worker but as constructor.

Developers write code which is a kind of design. In software the role of worker is taken by compiler and build pipeline. Having code written, we can then start many instances of running program created almost automatically. How beautiful it would be if we had "compilers" for building construction projects that would automatically execute design documents to create a real building?

Disclaimer to all construction workers who read that: if you don't have specs from architect/designer/constructor, then you are also a creative worker creating something out of nothing :)

Looking forward for more eye openers when continuing with the course :)

Ancient Romans were saying "divide and conquer". I really like this rule both in system design and project management. To adjust it to contemporary times which are full of distractions I would also add "eliminate" phase. It helps to avoid conquering false targets and allows to focus only on biggest value goals.

Please find below some examples of what this rule means in practice.

Divide

• Split complex problem into a number of smaller problems
• Isolate application modules
• Assign well defined responsibilities to teams and individuals
• Break up project into phases
• Define sub-tasks for stories to implement
• Set clear SMART goals

Eliminate

• Identify problems that can be ignored
• Reduce scope
• Remove distractions
• Ask "why?"
• Focus on goals, not procedures

Conquer

• Execute goals with deep believe
• Don't give up
• Improve
• Know when is enough
• Celebrate success

"Divide, eliminate and conquer" approach often helped me when I was feeling overwhelmed by a difficult problem or had to choose which path to go. I believe it is useful in wide range of situations starting from fulfilling New Year's resolutions up to setting and executing enterprise strategy.

Most of the dev teams have daily meetings in the calendar. Daily meeting is a good opportunity to share with other team members what's in our head currently. You may get help, recommendations or share your knowledge and  useful discoveries.

Daily meetings is also a good way to build the team spirit. Especially for distributed teams it is often the only chance during workday to see each others via video and hear each others voices.

But when following traditional meeting structure, we often can notice that team members are almost everyday saying something like: "Yesterday I was working, today I will be working, everything is OK". Status is visible on board, others can see the contributions, why to waste time on going into details? Sometimes it's indeed challenging and even uncomfortable for team members to say something more.

If this is your situation and dailies start to look as a waste of time and being uncomfortable for the team, your team may try a different approach: going through items in current sprint/board instead of going through people. You can find an interesting discussion about this approach here.

You may also mix both approaches by going by items for example on every 2nd day. The most important thing is continuous improvement and trying what works best for your team.

Cons​

Microservices bring many problems that do not exist in monolithic applications or are much easier to solve. What challenges will you have?

• Data consistency is difficult to achieve. Distributed transactions result in poor performance. The trade-off is eventual consistency but asynchronous communications is often not easy to accept
• Error handling becomes more complicated because of distributed nature of the system. Failure in one service may require to trigger undo operation in another service
• Synchronous dependencies between services reduce performance and availability. Calling service waits until called service will do its stuff. In case of synchronous communication SLA of the system is multiplication of its micro services (0.99 SLA in service one x 0.99 SLA in service 2 = 0.9801 SLA of the system composed of 2 services)
• Remote calls between services are over network, usually HTTP, so data serialization is required what reduces performance
• Bigger effort must be put into integration tests
• Fault tolerance needs a lot of attention
• Fully automated build and release pipelines are a must because of large number of deployment units. Manual management would be too time-consuming and too error-prone
• Application monitoring, metrics, alerts and self-healing mechanisms must be implemented to successfully manage production environments. It is absolutely counter-productive to manually search logs in tens or hundreds of running application nodes

Pros​

Why to take the burden then? When it is beneficial to choose micro-services over monolithic app?

• Divide and conquer principle. System split into smaller highly independent parts is easier to manage and maintain. It is like splitting large complicated problem into many smaller and easier problems
• Teams can be smaller and work more independently. Ownership is bigger because teams feel responsible for their parts. In large monolithic app responsibility is often diffused
• Failures affect smaller parts of the system, other components may be still functional
• Each system part can be planned, developed and deployed quite independenty.
• Different parts of the system may use different technology what allows to update technology stack more often and use different tools for different problems
• Each part of the system can scale independently. It is easier to identify bottlenecks
• With mature dev ops culture it is easy to spin up a new service and provision new computing resources. It is often much more effective and less risky than modifying existing service
• Microservices can be a medicine pill for tired teams. Sometimes teams just need to start from the scratch, leave old buggy system aside for a while and do something smaller that they can be proud of and have fun with

Summary​

Microservices are technically harder to develop but in some situations it pays off to take that extra effort. This architecture would be a more natural direction for larger organizations with proven business model and mature teams who are committed to devops culture. For smaller products and start-ups which are still discovering their business model the extra burden brought with microservices may not help but be counter-productive.

There is no single best architecture that fits all problems. Architecture decisions must be based on business and technical constraints. We often call those constraints as "non-functional requirements".

What are the example drivers?

• time - when project has to be delivered? is there a deadline like upcoming changes in law, scheduled event or a business opportunity that exist only for a while?
• scope - how much there is to be done? is it a small project or long-term investment?
• skills in the team - what programming languages, frameworks and tools the team is most productive with?
• scalability - how many users will be using the software? how fast the number of users will grow? will there be any peaks in traffic?
• performance - are the operations happening in real-time or can be done in background with acceptable delay?
• security - is there a risk of data breach or system does not deal with private data?
• maintainability - will the system be developed in long-term? will it be evolving and changing often? should regression tests be automated or it is acceptable to perform manual tests once and codebase will be frozen afterwards?
• availability - what happens in case of system failure? is the plane crashing so that system has to be up 100% of time, or maybe it is a background data integration and it is acceptable when system will be down for a couple of hours?
• business process automation - is it required to automate all the steps and cases in the process or it is acceptable to leave some manual work to be done for example by customer care department
• platform - on which devices will the software be used? Smartphones, laboratory devices, cars, servers, watches, payment terminals or many of them?
• usability - is it a B2C/C2C software intended to be used by end-consumers or only trained stuff will be using it?
• already possessed resources - do employees already work on MacBooks and all DevOps tools are built for AWS? Then .NET 4.7 and Azure are not the best choice
• budget - Last but not least. Are we investing in a product that already brings revenue? How much will we save or earn thanks to that project? Is it a new business idea to validate at lowest possible cost?

It is important to list constraints at the beginning of the project and make it transparent for both stakeholders and development team. Having common awareness of constraints allows to make more confident, accurate and quicker decisions.

It is also important to note that drivers may change when business environment will change. Good architecture will adopt without putting too much effort to prepare for that at early stage. Example: you may built the search functionality based on simple SQL "like" query, but abstract the search functionality so that it is decoupled and will be possible to be replaced by more scalable technology in the future without changing other parts of the system.

When the system has good logical structure it will be much easier to adopt it in the future for larger amount of users, even if the architecture at the beginning is a simple monolithic app. But if the logic is mixed-up since the beginning and code is a mess, no matter what fancy architecture and tools will be used - the project will fail.

Summary

• Know and communicate your drivers.
• Estimate how likely it is for each driver to change
• Have a high-level plan of adopting to likely changes

That rules lead to better decisions when building software.

If you are a candidate and are not sure what questions to ask during the interview, check the list below. Asking good questions is as important as providing correct answers.

If  you are a recruiter do not be surprised that candidates may be asking those questions. Prepare for it if possible or even better include some details in job description.

Company​

It is a wide topic and many questions can be asked about the company in general. In IT you can ask if the company has it's own products or is an IT service provider for other companies. In case of own products, what are the products? Who is using the products? For service companies ask about the customers and projects. You may also ask about the history of the company and its vision for the future.

Team​

The team you will be working in will be important part of your everyday life. What is the experience of other team members? Will you find mentors from whom you can learn?  Are there junior colleagues you can teach? What are the roles? Does team also include some business people, designers, testers, DevOps specialists? What are the other teams that you will closely cooperate with?

Project​

What is the project that you will be working on? Is it a single project or couple of applications? Is it a greenfield project or a legacy system? What is the technology? How big is the team working on it? What is the timeline of the project?

When you ask the interviewer to provide more details about the project you will  usually get all the relevant answers. But also be prepared that in some cases you won't be allowed to know that kind of information until you sign the NDA agreement.

Process​

What is the project management methodology? Scrum, Kanban, waterfall? What tools are used to manage tasks? How often is the product released? It would be good to know ahead so that you can prepare a little bit before joining the new workplace in case you are not familiar with some of the industry practices.

You may be also interested if company is using any continuous integration and delivery tools like Jenkins, TeamCity or AzureDevOps and how testing process looks like. Are automated tests prepared, who is responsible for creating it? Are there any other types of tests like performance or security tests?

If you would like to go deeper and company has relevant standards in place, you may also ask about definition of ready and definition of done. For example does it include code review as obligatory element?

Assuming that your future employer is taking IT professionally and has some version control tools in place, you may also be interested in a branching model. Is company using some standard approach like GitFlow?

Technology​

What programming languages are the key requirement? What libraries and frameworks are used? Is system deployed to cloud or on-premises servers? Which cloud is it: AWS, Azure, Google or maybe some other provider? What is the architecture of the front-end? Is backend monolithic or split into (micro)services? What is the technology for databases? How database is accessed? You will be able to deduct most of the answers about technology from job offer, but it's worth to understand what technologies would be most relevant. Job offers sometimes include more than is essential for everyday work, or in contrary do not mention some of the solutions used.

It is also helpful to ask if the technical stack is already decided for long-term or will be chosen by the team. Another scenario that you may check is the possibility to move between projects or teams in the future and what technology changes you could expect in that cases.

Hardware​

What is the usual hardware setup? Can you have 2 monitors on your desk? What is the operating system? Do employees work on laptops? What is the hardware setup of the computer? Will you have access to some additional devices for testing like mobile devices, smartwatches, IoT sensors etc if applicable?

Role​

This is probably most important area to investigate. How does the usual workday looks on this position? What are the key skills? How much time will you spent on feature development compared to bug-fixes or meetings?

Career path​

What are the options for promotion on given position? Where do people usually move next in the organization after this role?

Personal development​

What options company provides to be up to date with fast-changing industry? Are there any internal or external trainings? Does company sponsor any certification paths or provides access to self-study resources like Pluralsight? Is there any educational budget that can be used to participate in conferences or workshops? What is the budget limit for this position?

Salary range​

Information about salary range becomes a standard in IT recruitment. Don't be afraid to ask about it, it is not a taboo. It should never be your only motivator for accepting the offer, but also the reality is that no professional plans next career move without considering salary raise or at least staying at the similar level. So make sure at the early stage that you won't be disappointed after putting more effort into recruitment process and taking interviewers' time.

Even if it's your first job is worth to have some pre-defined expectations based on easily available public salary reports and your non-commercial / academical record.

Always keep in mind that salary range will usually depend on your experience and skills that given position requires. The range can be quite wide if company is open to hire specialists on different levels. It's up to you to prove that you deserve to be close to the upper limit and there is no better candidate than you.

Other benefits​

It is very common nowadays to get additional benefits like sport card membership,  private medical care, mobile phone, free beverages, snacks or even meals.  Some companies may offer other things like company shares. Depending on your position you may also get a car but it's not common in IT unless your position requires a lot of local travelling.

Team building activities​

We spent significant amount of time at work. Co-workers often become our  friends with whom we go out for a beer, play sports, discuss movies near coffee machine, eat lunch. It's good to know if company supports some company-wide or team integration events.

Location​

I know so many people that were changing job mainly because of location. People value their time and prefer not to spend to much time commuting. Ask where is the office that you will be working in but also ask about other locations the company may have to be prepared to be part of a remote team what is quite common in today's global economy.

Working hours​

In IT you can expect flexible starting hours between 7 and 10 but it may be different from company to company. Some positions require close cooperation with external partners which may be working on specific hours or even different time zones. Sometimes you need to have at least of a few hours of overlap with partners from other time-zones.

Relocation package​

Are you moving to another city or country? Ask if company provides some support with relocation. It could be paperwork help, helping with finding the apartment to rent or even providing some extra money to cover relocation costs.

Office​

Is it possible to see some photos or movie from the office? Some companies that are proud of their workplace publish movies showing the office in their corporate page or YouTube channel.

Can you come by bike? Is there a car parking available? Is there a relax room? Is there a place where you can make a short private phone call? Is it open-space or smaller rooms? Is it possible to work on a stand-up desk? That are interesting topics but also be careful not to flood recruiter with tens of that kind of questions. If you have good general impression about that company just trust that it will be OK and you will be able to sort it out.

Things like restaurants and gyms in the neighborhood or public transport options you can check by yourself on Google Maps once you know the address and the address is not in North Korea. Do not use recruiters time for that, it's not your personal assistant ;)

Remote work​

Also check options of remote work. Do developers work on laptops? If not, you can probably assume that in practice remote work won't be easy to organize. Companies usually do not recommend or forbid to recreate your work environment on your personal computer at home. I've seen developers taking stationary PC from office to home to work remotely, but well... that were old days.

Today most likely it could be the other way. Some companies have BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. In this case you can expect that remote work is quite common for given employer.

Travel​

Does position require business trips? How often and where? Is there a kick-off training in other location, for example in the headquarters? How much time will it take? If you have some limitations to travel tell about it. If you like to travel also tell that you are open to that and it won't be a problem. Whatever is your situation make it clear since the beginning.

Summary​

The list is quite long. Recruitment meetings usually have schedule and as candidate you usually can expect 5-10 minutes being dedicated to answer your questions. At the first meeting or call choose 2-3 questions most important to you. Do your homework and do not ask about things which could be easily checked online by yourself.

If it's the final interview feel free to ask anything that you want to know. All in all changing job is a big decision.

A debate about software release process​

In every software project there is a lot of emotional discussions about the release process, branching model, testing environments.

All that discussions usually want to answer a question: how the hell we can make a stable deployment with less stress and less bugs?

You can deploy few times a day or once a month, you can have monolithic application or microservices - it does not matter so much. You can always apply the following rules.

The rules​

1. There was a deployment to production - put aside this version so it is easy to add hot-fixes to it in case of emergency.  Test hotfixes on a dedicated environment. Update production-like version of code after applying hotfix changes to production.
2. Focus team efforts on preparing next release.
   • Start with merging some finished development tasks. What does it mean finished? It depends on your definition of done. It may include code review done, automated tests passing, metrics matching or just a developer changing status to "Resolved" if you can take more risk
   • Have release candidate tested in dedicated environment where QA team / release manager has the ownership when and what can be added
   • When verifying release candidate only fixes related to the tasks under tests are allowed
   • Any other tasks can be added only after the approval of people responsible for release
   • Remember that adding anything new to release candidate may destabilize the whole version and delay the release
   • Avoid reverts and cherry-picks or even forbid it allowing only for merging changes
   • Have tools to track what commits related to which tasks were added to the release candidate
   • Do not take too much validation work at once. Try to achieve stable release candidate in at most 2 weeks.
3. When release candidate is stable and everything works as expected you can deploy immediately. If you have strict release process with fixed dates, put this version aside to be waiting for next release. You already know that your release notes won't be empty. It can be only better. Start preparing next release candidate on top of that. If it will be stable before agreed release date, again put aside a bigger version and repeat this process until your release date has come.

Process has several steps but it doesn't have to be cumbersome to follow. If your team is able to perform all the steps above automatically, within minutes or even seconds, it means that you have successful implemented continuous delivery - holy grail for release managers.

The ultimate goal - being reliable​

This process can be implemented by adopting GitFlow but this is not the only way. Ultimate goal is to be certain about every deployment to production. Without any surprising changes appearing on production and without any panic on the release day and hours after that.

The scope of the release is usually negotiable. But the trust is usually not. Reliable software teams prefer to make smaller amount of changes or introduce it later rather than risking production system being unstable.

The beginning​

In 2013 I've co-founded Epicode software house. Before starting the company we were doing after-hours projects with my business partner. He was handling sales and design. I was handling development. This is also how we split the duties in Epicode. He became CEO and I was CTO. At the beginning, it was quite an easy role in a company of 2 employees.

Working as we liked​

We would probably not start Epicode as a full-time job if not the big customer open for cooperation: Grupa Pracuj where we both worked before. Grupa Pracuj was just starting a new startup: emplo.com and needed to build a development team for it. They become our biggest customer and shareholder. It was a good deal. We had financial security and independence. We could do the software business as we liked. Our customers including Grupa Pracuj cared only about results.

Quick start and early success​

I've relocated back from Ireland to Poland to start working full time at Epicode. In July 2013 there was me, my partner, emplo.com project starting and 3 other small ecommerce customers we had as a result of our part-time moonlight work before Epicode. Good start to grow. Soon we started hiring and rented an office. After 2 years we were over 20 people: developers, testers and designers.

Growing challenges​

Next 3 years has shown us exactly the challenges of growing company over 30 employees. For that you need to delegate and to have middle-management. We were not ready for that. As local "superheros" we felt that we must be directly involved in every project to be sure that it will succeed. We were focusing on project-related work, not on growing the company. There was also a constant feeling that if we hire more people we are not sure if we will manage to get enough customers. On the one hand we always had a big workload, but we were never sure if this workload is stable enough to hire more people.

When running a software house, the biggest challenge is to have proper balance between new projects coming-in and number of hired people. The only cost that matters are salaries. If you hire too many people you can quickly produce lost.  Crucial part is to have predictable sales pipeline so that you can plan at least couple of months ahead.

Learning sales​

We did an effort to hire a sales person but it has only shown how unprepared we were to scale. That person reached out to over 500 potential customers but didn't even manage to setup a single meeting. It turned out that sales person did not understand what we were really selling. For us it was obvious: we were listening what problems customer wants to solve and then we were proposing how we would approach that by providing appropriate software solution. It usually worked. Our sales meetings were not about sales, it was about free consultancy after which the customer simply wanted to work with us. But this approach did not scale without proper staff training, marketing content and well-prepared case studies. With an ad-hoc sales person concentrated solely on rates that we offer and deadlines that we can meet, the effect was terrible. We were treated like spammers.

Goal bigger than sales - do what you like doing​

But the reality was that we were not convinced if we would really like to focus on marketing, sales and growing the company.  Once we have got a project we were sinking into delivering it, forgetting about searching the next thing to do after current project will be done. When I was working on non-technical stuff I had a feeling of loosing time and energy on something that is not really my pair of shoes. Using social media for promotion? Blah... We are hackers, developers, creators, not marketers. If somebody does not want to work with us, it's them who should regret. I was not realising how arrogant that way of thinking was.

Our company started to drift into games direction and developing our own game. Many people we had onboard wanted to work on own product which would give much more freedom on how to work. Not to relay solely on B2B sales, contracts and timelines, especially that we were not mastering that processes. Developing a game had a chance to become a high-margin business - with higher risk but also with higher gratitude if it will turn out to be successful.

But for me personally it was not something I wanted to do. I was excited about solving real-life problems that companies or end-users have. I didn't want to close myself in a dark room coding a virtual world. My preference was working with people and business processes.

There is no progress without change​

After 5 years at Epicode I decided to go my own path. We had great time at Epicode with plenty of success stories and delivered projects. But I needed a fresh context and new fuel. Now I am excited to be a part of scale-up process at Mash.com.  Scaling is something that failed for us in Epicode, that's why I am so enthusiastic about being a part of it at Mash.

I'd like to share 2 sentences which came to my mind this evening...

1. Business is easy to understand but hard to master

So many business coaches, so many books and success stories. They say: just do it! But in practice it's so hard to build your own product which would earn 1 little dollar a day.

2. Technology is hard to understand but easy to master

Technology is often abstract or complicated. A lot of jargon around it. It's not easy to understand that jargon without being a part of it. On the other hand the rules are simple. You have the specs, the docs, just learn it and it's almost guaranteed that it will work if you follow the instructions carefully. Everything is predictable and well defined - totally not like in business.

Where do I see myself?

I understand business, but I do not master it. I understand technology and master significant areas of it. In my professional journey I am looking for environments when I can work closely with business and people who master it. My role is to add value by managing and building technical solutions supporting given business model.