neilmendum

author: @neilmendum
title: Approaches to a consistent developer experience
date: 04-February-2023

Approaches to a consistent developer experience

Recently I have been conducting a few interviews and one of the questions we often ask is "describe how code gets from a developers laptop and onto a production server". It's quite open ended and gives an insight into people's view of software delivery.

It got me thinking about how companies I’ve worked at have approached developer experience and how they scaled teams. For context I’ve mainly worked at mature companies with numerous departments compromising of feature teams, and the number of developers is in the hundreds. I mention this after reading Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency because I think that having an agreed upon collection of technologies is typically a prerequisite to building a consistent developer experience.

neilmendum

author: @neilmendum
title: Prometheus rate function and testing alert rules
date: 06-December-2022

Prometheus rate function and testing alert rules

The department I work in, HMPPS, has a collection of Helm charts which provides opinionated charts for folks to leverage. Rather than needing to start from scratch, teams who are building typical HMPPS services can make use of them.

Two of the charts most commonly used:

neilmendum

author: @neilmendum
title: Container Canary and testing Dockerfiles
date: 14-July-2022

Container Canary and testing Dockerfiles

A couple of months ago I came across NVIDIA/container-canary on Hacker News. It got me thinking about testing Dockerfiles which is not something I've really thought about before and is quite cool!

I thought that it could be used for a number of reasons: