Just finished this great book! It was really entertaining and interesting 🙂
And it explained the advantages of DevOps and CI/CD in a very understandable way 😁

Do you have any other good recommendations for IT novels?

I just learned a new word that many of you could need:

Fubar - Fucked up beyond all recognition

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

So, I recently picked up this book called "The Phoenix Project". I picked it up as I thought it was a project management text book. Turns out its a novel on how this Auto parts company's IT department broke down its silos and embraced DevOps. It's even framed as a thriller - the stakes always get higher! Extremely Exciting!

My Wife, kids and I listen to the audiobook as we drive and do errands every day. My Wife has gotten a very very frank understanding of what my job is like as a result.

I encourage everyone here to get a copy of the book.

Most awkward video conference call?

Our department is in a 'virtual' book club, reading The Unicorn Project, and I asked..
Me: "So what similarities have you seen with the Phoenix project and projects we work on here?"
Dale: "Ha ha..sooo many. The biggest is the disconnect of managers with no clue of what goes on."
<Vice president of our department also in the book club>
VP: "Really? Dale, I'd like to know more about this."
<awkward silence with blank stares all around>
DBA: "Come on Dale...spill the beans. Got the VP right there."
Dale: "Um...nope...not going there...nope"
<Dale's screen goes black>
VP: "OK, so when Maxine asks ..."

I'm learning nginx and it's simplying the way I think about web projects.

I used to think that when I used a server side framework, then that should be the master and all should go through it. Noob me.

I used to put client side projects (like create-react-app of vue-cli projects) right inside the server side project.

But with nginx you can just route subpaths to different places, then instead of having, let's say, the react project inside rails, they would be in separate git projects.

In fact, I no longer need to restrict myself to a single server framework.

I love several aspects of rails. I love several others of node. And if I need multithreaded performance, I'd very much use something like phoenix or go.

Again, with nginx, you setup subpaths with the `location` directive in the same server and voila, a no CORS setup, cookies shared and homogenous versatile website.

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

Just done with The Phoenix Project. Amazing book, I got if as an ebook. Wouldn’t mind more books similar to that style

I started reading “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim. And in the first chapter itself two people from the IT department get fired, and the author is forced to takeover the CIO position. Damn, now I’m shook. Is Tech really that much under appreciated and management that much hostile ?

Poll: do you think everyone, especially managers, should read The Phoenix Project?

My personal opinion: yes... They need to understand the horrors from unplanned work and how to prevent it... I'm getting really tired of checking up after people...

So I had a discussion now with my mom about my work and it turned into a rant. But I came to this conclusion:

My most effective way to screen candidates for a backend/fullstack tech job would be to ask them what are the most influential programming books they have read and why.

If they don't mention any books (or points covered in these books) in this list, they immediately fail:
-the effective engineer
-clean coder
-code complete
-team geek
-the Phoenix project

I can't get over the fact that my company downgraded the project from Elixir Phoenix to nodejs express.

I asked them why, they told me, the elixir is difficult and blablabla. In my resume, I did mention I have the experience for 2 and a half years (phoenix one year) , I can do that. and previously the senior here used elixir for scalibility , etc. Personally, the system he built weren't bad at all.

now in nodejs , with the async await promise shit.

but 'we prefer old tech' they say . old is gold they say .

Wait nodejs isn't old. To me elixir is like Ruby and Erlang had sex and gave birth to it and named it elixir.

Almost 2022 , I am still confuse why the f### the company downgrade the project from elixir phoenix to nodejs to laravel php.

Not a rant but wanted to get some thoughts from everyone.

I have health problems and unfortunately just had a seizure a few days ago.... Below is directed at my managers. They are nice guys and when I do get back I need them to accommodate although I feel the entire team should be run like this.

Now taking a step back, I see I need to reestablish my way of doing things/mojo. I cannot handle constant chaos and changes. I have to be in a calm, relaxed environment where I can think and enjoy coding: finding and building solutions. That's the summary of how I got into programming and learned to pick things up.

Furthermore, the ideas of the Phoenix Project and what I've shared over the years are actually what I need to be able to perform and excel. Probably the same for everyone and a good way to preempt burnout. It's just in this case, I am the first to go. I cannot be jumping around all the time and need to establish a comfort/expertise zone (but I do and can extend out when given enough time and opportunity).

I'm thinking the EU team probably operates like this, in a calm and orderly environment, less the rare issues.

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

After listening to The Phoenix Project audio book

"The phoenix project" book

Last night my subconscious shifts into management monologue mode imagining me and my managers in dialogues discussing all the problems that they're missing using management teens and references to the Phoenix Project, which I reminded I told them to read 4yrs ago in my first discussion after joining the team....

But basically mind was sorta on fire while half asleep?

Woke up this morning, and calm so wondering... Is this the stuff that my dreams are, except usually I don't remember anything....

A lot of the skills I use at work are actually learned on my own time. And a lot of the time, it feels like I trying to drag the team forward but everyone else does things that drag them, and thus me as well, backwards.

There's always work but most of it is low value and there's just less and less time to make things better because no one else has any opinion of how things should be...

Maybe I should just give up... Again....

I really need to find a better job or at least one without so much technical debt.

Feels like actually my PM is exactly like the name of in Phoenix Project... But I guess he'll never take any meaningful action.

But when I'm not sure what that is... Guess it really is hiring the right people and doing things right from the start, it at least fixing them immediately.

**END internal monologue and summary**

Just read the phoenix project. It's fucking hilarious!

I wonder if someone on here has made similar experiences. If so, I'm truly sorry.

And fuck Sarah.

Momentum and flow state is such a magical thing, like compound interest. I started off the Phoenix Project with like 2 or 3 chapters per day. But in the last two days I read like 15 chapters (5 chapters + 10 chapters) and finished the book.

The Phoenix Project made me really excited about DevOps - but I see comments about it being old logic. Why isn't it used everywhere then?

I have started reading The Phoenix Project and I suspect that story is based on current situation in company I work for ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)