We had a great meeting at ScalaSyd last Wednesday night, probably one of the best I’ve been to. These are my notes from the evening, which are in no way comprehensive – they are just the points I found most interesting.
Jed (@jedws) warned us at the start that there were two “pointy” talks with some soft stuff in the middle, but I found the two pointy talkers did an excellent job of conveying their pointy subjects to neophytes. Not an easy task, so well done, guys.
Last week at Tyro we had a fairly serious production issue. Thankfully, the impact was nowhere near as serious as the kind of outages that most Aussie banks have delivered over the last couples of years; our merchants could still accept payments and they could access their reports, but our backend processing was banked up such that their transactions weren’t appearing on reports for about an hour. That might not sound too serious, but our merchants are accustomed to seeing transactions appear in their reports pretty much instantly, so when our monitoring told us we weren’t delivering on that expectation we considered it a serious incident.
There was lots of good news out of this. Dev and Ops rallied as one team. We fixed the problem, and we managed to fix it without deploying a code patch. We learnt about an important performance restriction in our system that was fixed the next day and gave us knowledge that we can use to improve going forward. And we managed to get it solved before the last bus on my route for the night.
The bad news was that it took us a long time to get to the good news: it was about nine hours from the first indication of the incident to when we finally executed the winning solution. Looking back, I feel a bit stupid that we didn’t – that I didn’t – solve it in a quarter of that time. All the information we needed to lead us to the solution was staring us in the face, right from the beginning.
I’ve always been pretty good at debugging. Until a couple of years ago I’d never thought much about why I find it easy, but once I realised that I didn’t know why I was good at something, I had to know. So I dedicated some time to analysing my own internal, instinctive thought process, and from what I’ve observed it can be reduced to this:
Two weeks ago, I and a couple of other developers from Tyro went to the first “Migrate to DVCS Sydney” Meetup at Atlassian’s new headquarters. Here’s my notes on the most salient points from the evening (with some editorial by me in italics) …
Welcome to my new blog! I’ve had blogs before. I had a blog about photography for a couple of months. I had an active blog about Scala for quite a while, which even achieved fleeting fame a couple of times. But when circumstances pull me in other directions such that I haven’t taken any photos for a few months and I haven’t written any Scala for a few months, I’ve got nothing to add to those blogs.
While those blogs may have become stagnant, I have not. I’m learning things all the time, every day; things that are fascinating, things that are useful and things that are worth sharing. I realised that constraining my previous blogs to certain topics resulted in constraining which parts of my new knowledge I was able to share with people. I tend to read a lot, both on the web and from dead trees, and I learn lots of things that I think other people might benefit from hearing about.
So, this is my new blog, and it’s about me. It will be about Scala, but also about software in general; and it might be about photography, but also more widely about life lessons; and it will probably have some stuff about writing software at Australian banking startup Tyro Payments; and it might sometimes be about being a Dad and a husband, working happily with people, living in Sydney, playing the drums, designing web sites, reading books. These are all things I do, all things I’m learning from, and all topics where I’ve learned useful things that it would be useful to share. But really, the topic is me. Hopefully, amongst all that defines me, both the person I am and the person I’m becoming, you’ll find something worth reading about and, most of all, some things worth learning.
Image credit: Zephyrance Lou