K-pop has evolved dramatically over the years, with new generations of idols pushing the boundaries of what we know about the industry. If we take a step back, we can notice an interesting parallel between the growth of K-pop groups and the way we develop software 😄! From the early days of K-pop groups like SES and Girls Generation to the global groups of BLACKPINK and BTS, K-pop groups have undergone a major transformation. This journey can be compared to the shift from monolithic systems to microservices in the tech world! 🤖💻 ...

DevOps is like a bread maker 🍞🐱‍🏍 it takes a variety of inputs, processes them, and produces a final product with minimal manual intervention. Just like how you add ingredients to a bread maker (flour, yeast, sugar, etc. 🍰), DevOps involves providing code, infrastructure, and automation to produce a continuous flow of delivery. Let’s break down the 3 fundamentals of DevOps and explore some best practices using the bread maker analogy! ...

The world of software engineering is constantly evolving, and so is the technology we use to build software. Artificial Intelligence tools, like GitHub Copilot, have rapidly emerged as valuable assistants in the software development process. But it’s essential to remember that AI is a tool and not the driver. It is the software engineer who remains in control, using AI as a helpful co-pilot rather than relying on it to lead and drive the way. ...

Why should we promote a pairing culture? 🌳 Pairing offers numerous valuable benefits that help enhance team dynamics and professional growth 🌴: Knowledge Exchange and Growth 💚 Mentoring and reverse-mentoring Accelerated skill development 💹 Effective knowledge transfer Team Development 💛 Enhanced communication skills Stronger collaborative relationships Faster onboarding of new members Organisational Benefits ☕ Elimination of knowledge silos Continuous team up-skilling Improved project outcomes through shared expertise As part of the PaaS team at Xero, when managing core CI/CD tooling, our team frequently encounters diverse customer requests 😎. While balancing these support responsibilities with our planned sprint work, we sometimes face challenging situations, including: ...

How Team Topologies Relates to the Different Positions Played in League of Legends In both software development and competitive gaming, effective team structure and collaboration are critical to achieving success. Whether you are managing a sofware engineering team or playing a game of League of Legends (LoL), how you organise your team and define roles impacts the overall performance and outcome. In this blog, I’m going to draw an interesting comparison between Team Topologies: a framework used to define and optimise team structures in modern software engineering, and the positions in League of Legends. While one is about creating scalable and efficient software, and the other is about winning a fast-paced game, the principles of collaboration, specialised roles, and strategic alignment remain the same. If you haven’t read the book: Team Topologies yet, please checkout my previous blog post on book recommendations where it has more information about this blog and why you should read it! ...

Benefits 🦘 Infrastructure Automation | HashiCorp Developer I prepared for the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate certification, which is about: Fundamentals of Terraform: The certification covers core concepts and skills related to Terraform, including infrastructure as code (IaC), basic Terraform commands, and the ability to manage and deploy infrastructure using Terraform 📝 Practical Application: It focuses on practical knowledge, such as creating and managing Terraform configurations, understanding the Terraform workflow, and applying best practices for writing and organising Terraform code ⭐ How I prepared books (~ 6 weeks) HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Practice Exam What is HCP Terraform? | Terraform | HashiCorp Developer I created a weekly schedule to study one practice exam per week. There are 5 practice exams and one final exam available which is slightly different: Terraform Fill-In-The-Blank Questions. ...

📚 Recommended Books for Software Engineers 📚 As a software engineer, continually enhancing your skills and knowledge is crucial. Reading books that provide insights into different aspects of software development, team dynamics, and coding best practices can significantly help contribute to your professional growth. Here are three highly recommended books that every software engineer should read. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations 🚀 Authors: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim ...

Serverless Days! Click here to see the full agenda I had the amazing opportunity to attend ServerLess Days. If you are working with serverless technology and would like to meet other active developers and technical leaders from across the Australia & New Zealand region, while hearing from some world-class speakers, I highly recommend attending this event! Here is a quick recap of my learnings!! Think, Architect, and Build Serverless Applications as Set Pieces Speaker: Sheen Brisals Accumulated architecture HIDES complexity Distributed architecture SHOWS the complexity Problem Decomposition Utilise serverless characteristics Event-driven architecture Using managed services Infrastructure-as-code ♥ Employ PROVEN patterns Domain Driven Design Domains and sub-domains Bounded context Team Topologies Team ownership and custodians Microservices Independently releasable single-purpose services SUSTAIN the architecture, application and processes 🌳 ⬇ sustainability: Waterfall development ⬆ sustainability: Serverless ways of thinking Evolving architecture Minimum Viable Product (MVP 🌟) Modular, extendable and observable product Follow lean principles Improve Value Stream Agile & Pragmatic Start SMALL and scale! Evolve in ITERATIONS Automate EVERYTHING 😎 DevOps Mindset Refactor Continuously 💖 Growing talent in the team 🌻 Enablement within the team 🌼 Celebrating wins Instill ownership Whether Serverless or Not, It’s all about how you drive your project! Speaker: Nelly Sattari Keywords: Accountable, Agile, Healthy and Focused The art of impossible Coach - Helping individuals Connector - Building a healthy team Conductor - Driving projects Compass - Setting the direction Don’t forget to connect with stakeholders Atlas Atlassian product that is a teamwork directory. For example, every Monday we can review how the team is doing! Making it clear what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are Building an Agile Team Fixed: People, Team and Scope Epic ▶ Milestone Incremental delivery Breakdown MVP Carry out within 1 to 2 sprints Importance of Sprint Goals ⚽ Achieving Sprint Goals is MORE important than shipping all the tickets Each milestone could be a goal? Goal setting meeting to review if the team met their goals in the previous sprint Teams can answer YES, PARTIALLY or NO If the sprint goal hasn’t been met, have a meeting to identify why the goals were not met Other Agile Rituals include Sprint Checkpoint and Capacity Planning 💟 DATA DRIVEN LEADERS 💟 Identifying work that is carried over multiple sprints, what are the dependencies? Why was this work not completed within the sprint? Measuring velocity Measure everything, no “gut feelings” Connection Social events Celebrating milestones Recognition Beware of burn-outs! Collaboration Providing training Mentoring and pairing Data-Driven Engineer who recognises importance of Agile rituals More team members can cause overhead Adding more team members doesn’t mean the team will have higher velocity Developing self-healing / stateless / idempotent systems Working on serverless and real time observability Summary Do the simple thing first Small team with fast feedback loop - showcase often Identify risk early, shift-left and spike Continuously measure performance and stress test Isolate context boundaries (lambdas) Solution must prove itself correct Using serverless functions for real-time observability Speaker: Liz Fong-Jones Most realtime bulk workloads benefit Move state from local machines onto object storage Shard list of objects into work units Parallelise object processing Reduce results outside Lambda afterwards Beware the dragons! 🐉 Avoid latency-insensitive batch workloads (cost) Avoid tiny workloads (set-up latency) Check cloud provider limits, state your intentions (capacity planning) Test cross-compilation including profiling to avoid performance issues with switching architectures

Benefits of getting AWS Certified ✨ Please note that the exam content has changed on 29th August 2022 (SAA-C03), so the content and resources I share in this post may be out-of-date! ☕ I prepared for the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate certification, which is about: Designing a solution by using appropriate AWS services and by following architectural principles based on requirements Providing implementation guidance based on best practices to the organisation throughout the workload lifecycle I got exposure to the wider AWS services than the ones I use regularly in my day to day job 😎 also, I gained a deeper understanding around AWS services and how they interact and fit together. I really enjoyed understanding various use cases and coming up with solutions, and getting a taste of what a role of a Solutions Architect may be like 🌟! ...