XYZ is fictional product inspired by personal experience, that happen went into the journey of monolith to microservices.
Turning Elephant into Colony of Ants – XYZ
Post Category → Code
Video & Audio Codec Primer
This post is not intended to explain the video in a comprehensive manner but rather to distill important pieces of knowledge that are relevant to TipTip needs.
Compression
Compression is a lossy process to shrink the size of the media, video in this case, to ensure the video can be streamed appropriately according to the user device’s requirements. This process removes information; in a simple example, If two frames are basically identical, we can get rid of the data for one frame and replace it with a reference to the previous frame. Video compression has a lot of techniques; encoding is one of them.
wait, we can do lossless right? yes – but the file high likely is still too large for TipTip use case (and might not make sense anyway).
Continue readingTech Debt Management
Defect/Bug Management
who doesn’t love bugs? they are small yet beautiful…ly ruining our life 🙂. Bug is inevitable, choosing 0 Bug as your OKR/KPI is an insane choice, it’s not impossible but it will astronomically hit your productivity & cost, your best bet is to manage it properly. So how are you organizing and managing these bugs? Assigning the right priority(by assessing its severity) is the key, inspired by a couple of references, here is how I typically categorize them.
Continue readingOn Observability
Running an application without having a proper monitoring is akin to driving without a dashboard. You don’t really know if you still have enough gas, or if you are within the speed limit, or how far are you till your next oil change. There are many uncertainties involved in running an application. Monitoring is instrumental in getting first hand awareness on possible incident or help predict that an incident is about to happen so we can prevent it.
This post outlines some observables that we can monitor and setup alert for along with some recommended practice.
Continue readingSoftware Fragmentation – The Golden Path
There is a direct correlation between teams that give their engineers autonomy to own their technical decisions and the team’s ability to hire and retain A-class or Senior talent. There is a tradeoff, but an acceptable level of chaos in exchange for a stronger sense of individual/team ownership is usually the right one and leads to higher performing teams in the long run – at least this is what I’ve been seeing if a couple of companies in Indonesia.
So, how to make sure these “chaotic” things are manageable and actually give the benefit to the team?
Continue readingManager Manifesto
Manifesto
- Giving critical feedback or having difficult conversations
- Assessing whether a product is ready for launch
- Designing and executing a realistic roadmap
- Setting good goals with accountability
- Building viable new products
- Managing a team during “war time” versus “peace time”
- Defining quality
- Determining who to hire
- Understanding people’s skills, strengths, and growth trajectories
Engineering Initiative, where to start?
Performance improvement we must do, but where to identify it? Sometimes this kind of things might not obvious as they are, as experience and frame of reference from each of the individual engineer within your team might vary.
This post intended to share questions and framework that I’ve been using (and pushing) to my team to give cue and where to start on finding room for engineering improvements.
Continue readingExcerpt on Regulated Data : Amount, Duration Data Holding, and Archiving
Data subjects are entitled to request the ESO delete their PII, and the ESO must do so accordingly. If the data subject does not request such deletion, under MoCI Regulation 20, an ESO shall comply with a five-year minimum statutory retention period or as otherwise required by the relevant supervisory authority. This retention period is calculated from the moment the data subject terminates the use of services of the ESO.Â
Continue readingEngineering North Star Metrics
In the world where all of the metrics are available to be fetch and tracked, we end up on too many things being measured or worst, too little things that are being measured. It is impractical to make smart decisions based upon all available data and impossible to make any decision without data, and virtually impossible to make every metric as a priority worthy of improvement. The first challenge is deciding on what to measure, this article is intended to propose following metrics as the de jure metrics that being tracked and constantly improved going forward within tech team that I led so far.
