harlow

Recently, we were fortunate to bring together top CTO talent from inside and outside the First Round Community to share best practices, challenges and insights. Key topics included how to create a great management team, introducing structure to your org, and tools for better technical productivity. Notes from this session are below.

BUILDING STRONG MANAGEMENT

• It's easy to build a management structure when things are early and small. But don't over-optimize this structure. It will change as you bring people on. For example, don't give out management titles until you have at least four teams.
• The best tactic is to have everyone start out as an engineer, then hire an engineering director and split the team in half. This is the cell-splitting model -- grow a team then split it into different cells.
• Don't promote people into management roles too early. It's better to hire a manager than to promote from within the ranks. The latter only causes conflict.
• Always remember, while someone might be a bril

harlow

Mezcal Bone Crusher

Here is a variation of a Bone Crusher, a drink originally inspired by acclaimed cocktail writer David Wondrich's Bone cocktail made from rye whiskey, lime juice, sugar and a few dashes of Tabasco.

Here, this spicy, earthy, smoky drink was made from Del Maguey's Single Village Mezcal (Minero), El Tesoro Reposado Tequila, demerara sugar simple syrup, lime and Tabasco.

The Breakdown

3 Fresh Limes

harlow

DynamoDB on Travis-CI

Leverage docker-compose to boot up the service and set a DYNAMODB_URL as an Env var. As described in the AWS Ruby SDK we can pass in a custom endpoint to the client.

client = Aws::DynamoDB::Client.new(endpoint: ENV['DYNAMODB_URL'])

harlow

console.log('Loading function');

exports.handler = function(event, context) {
    //console.log('Received event:', JSON.stringify(event, null, 2));
    event.Records.forEach(function(record) {
        // Kinesis data is base64 encoded so decode here
        var payload = new Buffer(record.kinesis.data, 'base64').toString('ascii');
        console.log('Decoded payload:', payload);
    });
    context.succeed("Successfully processed " + event.Records.length + " records.");

harlow

package checkpoint

import (
	"log"
	"strconv"

	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws"
	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws/awserr"
	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/service/dynamodb"
	"github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/service/dynamodb/dynamodbattribute"

harlow

// if "name" is returned as `[]` in JSON payload the json.Unmarshal func will panic in Golang
// Name struct {
//   GivenName  string `json:"givenName"`
//   FamilyName string `json:"familyName"`
//   Formatted  string `json:"formatted"`
// } `json:"name"`
type Profile struct {
	ID                string `json:"id"`
	Hash              string `json:"hash"`
	RequestHash       string `json:"requestHash"`

harlow

# lib/transformers/mixpanel/app_launched_event.rb
module Transformers
  module Mixpanel
    class AppLaunchEvent
      def initialize(data)
        @data = data
      end

      def csv_row
        CSV.generate_line(ordinal_transformed_data)

harlow

class Registration
  # Make this model play nice with `form_for`. Gives us validations, initialize, etc
  include ActiveModel::Model

  # Accessors for the fields we are exposing in the form
  attr_accessor :email, :password, :zip

  # This is an implementation detail of our authentication (Clearance). It's ultimately going to
  # sign this object in and that process expects a user object that has these fields available
  delegate :remember_token, :id, to: user

harlow

Observability in micro-service architectures

Concurrency Is Not Parallelism

General coding

go tooling in action

justforfunc refactoring

harlow

class Purchase
  include ActiveModel::Model
  
  attr_accessor :customer # + other order related fields..
  
  # some validations
  
  def save
    if valid?
      charge_customer && create_order