djspiewak

Greasing the Skids: Building Remote Teams

In the wake of the virus that-must-not-be-named (which most people misname anyway), it seems like everyone and their cat has posted some sort of opinion or how-to on making remote work, work. This is a good thing! Working remotely, particularly full-time, is hard! I've done it for my entire career (aside from an odd 14 month office period in the middle that we shall not speak of), but more relevantly, for the past two years I've been responsible for building, managing, and enabling an entirely remote team, distributed across nine timezones. Remote teams don't just happen by installing Slack and telling everyone to work on their couch: they require a lot of effort to do correctly and efficiently. But, done right, it can be a massive multiplier on your team efficiency and flexibility.

Here's how we do it. I'm going to attempt to structure this post more towards management than engineering, and so I apologize in advance if I assume terminology or knowledge which

jroper

git config --global alias.br "for-each-ref --sort=committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(HEAD) %(color:yellow)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) - %(color:red)%(objectname:short)%(color:reset) - %(contents:subject) - %(authorname) (%(color:green)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset))'"

jdegoes

package fpmax

import scala.util.Try
import scala.io.StdIn.readLine

object App0 {
  def main: Unit = {
    println("What is your name?")

    val name = readLine()

djspiewak

Thread Pools

Thread pools on the JVM should usually be divided into the following three categories:

1. CPU-bound
2. Blocking IO
3. Non-blocking IO polling

Each of these categories has a different optimal configuration and usage pattern.

eed3si9n

See https://github.com/sbt/sbt/wiki/sbt-1.x-plugin-migration for the list with sbt 1.x migration status.

---

plugin	star
playframework/playframework	9597
scala-js/scala-js	3053
sbt/sbt-assembly	1092
mpeltonen/sbt-idea	1085

aparrish

ptarjan

Scaling your API with rate limiters

The following are examples of the four types rate limiters discussed in the accompanying blog post. In the examples below I've used pseudocode-like Ruby, so if you're unfamiliar with Ruby you should be able to easily translate this approach to other languages. Complete examples in Ruby are also provided later in this gist.

In most cases you'll want all these examples to be classes, but I've used simple functions here to keep the code samples brief.

Request rate limiter

This uses a basic token bucket algorithm and relies on the fact that Redis scripts execute atomically. No other operations can run between fetching the count and writing the new count.

pjrt

import scala.language.implicitConversions
import scala.language.higherKinds

/**
 * A simple typeclass that converts types A to some specific Java type
 */
trait AllowedType[A] {

  type JavaType >: Null <: AnyRef

djspiewak

Getting Started in Scala

This is my attempt to give Scala newcomers a quick-and-easy rundown to the prerequisite steps they need to a) try Scala, and b) get a standard project up and running on their machine. I'm not going to talk about the language at all; there are plenty of better resources a google search away. This is just focused on the prerequisite tooling and machine setup. I will not be assuming you have any background in JVM languages. So if you're coming from Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Haskell, or anywhere…  I hope to present the information you need without assuming anything.

Disclaimer It has been over a decade since I was new to Scala, and when I was new to Scala, I was coming from a Java and Ruby background. This has probably caused me to unknowingly make some assumptions. Please feel free to call me out in comments/tweets!

One assumption I'm knowingly making is that you're on a Unix-like platform. Sorry, Windows users.

Getting the JVM

paulp

% sbtx dependencyGraph
... blah blah ...
[info] *** Welcome to the sbt build definition for Scala! ***
[info] Check README.md for more information.
[error] Not a valid command: dependencyGraph
[error] Not a valid project ID: dependencyGraph


% sbtx -Dplugins=graph dependencyGraph
... blah blah ...