Category: general

Microservice onboarding…

It has been a crazy couple of months since I took my new role. I have had so much new stuff to learn I haven’t been making a lot of time for other technical pursuits in my spare time. But that being said I am on paternity leave right now, so I figured it was a good time to sit back and reflect on my first couple of months. Similar to Choose the first project that I was asked to work on was to write a new Micro Service. This got me to thinking maybe this is the way to on board a senior engineer.

What does it tell the company about he new employee

First it quickly shows you if the person you hired can actually do what they say. If they can’t stand up a new app for a small service but have sold themselves as senior level you probably want to find that information out as quickly as possible. I wish this wasn’t a reason for doing something, but unfortunately there are a lot of people in our industry who really play buzzword bingo on their resumes, but their actual technical skills don’t live up to what they sell them as.

It is also going to show the new company how adaptable is this person. How quickly can they learn the new build environment, and follow the new companies coding standards and processes.

It gives the company a really engaged engineer as they start out doing what is considered in the product development world the best kind of work which is new development from scratch.

Benefits for the employee

You start out on green field which gives you a bit of time to learn the new system architecture. It also keeps the excitement and engagement level high as everyone loves knocking out a new project. As opposed to traditionally when you are fixing bugs to learn a code base, it is a great way to get into the guts of the code, but it is often work that isn’t nearly as fun, so it is sort of a taking your medicine approach to get up to speed. It is effective, but not always enjoyable.

You learn the new build and deployment environment. Going into my role I was used to doing everything as a maven build and we were deploying to Amazon EC2 containers. In my new role it is gradle multi module builds and docker containers running under Amazon’s Elastic Container Service. We are also doing continuous deployment which has been new and exciting. Most companies I have worked with in the last 10 years have been doing continuous integration, but I hadn’t actually seen someone make it all the way to the continuous delivery route, and it is an amazing thing to see. We also have a different development flow as a result doing Trunk Based Development as opposed to at Choose where we did GitFlow for our development model.

Where wouldn’t this work

It goes without saying you need a couple of things to take this approach. If you are developing a monolith and not a micro service architecture you can’t take this approach and are probably stuck with the traditional onboarding models. Also you would need a certain level of seniority to really have this be successful. If you were bring a junior or mid level engineer on board and they probably will have never stood up a production app before and will be used to working on an app that someone else boot strapped. So to take this approach with an employee like that you would need to provide much more guidance and mentoring for the employee so that they don’t get overwhelmed and frustrated with the task.

All in all I hope that future roles I take start out this interesting as it is definitely a fun stage in my career to get to do all these fun and challenging projects from the beginning.

I haven’t had a chance to update my blog lately as I have been so busy in my new role. That being said I did want to highlight the writing of some of my former coworkers as I think they are writing some great stuff. First check out Kevin Stephen’s blog over at: http://kevindstevens.com/ Kevin is talking about Technology, Growth, and Venture Capital all topics that I find interesting. Also our former Chief Revenue Officer John Tough is blogging over at: http://johntough.com/ John has provided some great stories about the whole acquisition process and even as an employee I learned things that I wasn’t aware of at the time, so I have really enjoyed his writing. My final reading recommendation is Jonathan Crowder over at: https://medium.com/@jonathan.m.crowder He is also writing some great business content. Though JC you really need to host on your own site and not on medium. Own your content man! Anyway check out their posts there is some good stuff there. Going forward I have been playing around with some new stuff in my new role and I plan on discussing some of that going forward.

Today was my last day at choose. What a ride it has been. Thus far it has been my favorite job in my entire career. The quality of the team was top notch and I can’t believe how much software we shipped. The turn around was epic and we just had a ton of fun at work. We took a couple of pictures from our last happy hour.

What an amazing 14 months. And now on to the next thing. I will be taking a new role as a Software Architect to help out a new company migrate from a legacy platform to the world of microservices built on Spring Boot and I am super excited for the opportunity. I know I will be applying what I learned in my current role a lot as we learned a ton going down that road and hopefully I can use that to increase the velocity at which we ship code even more in my new role.

When I posted my previous post, I left out most of the details about our acquisition as I was not sure what information was public and what wasn’t. Now that there has been some press around the acquisition I figured I would share some of it to provide some details.

First off we had a story in Fortune about Red Ventures acquiring us. After reading that story, I found another story trending on linked in from Green Tech Media. I liked that the Green Tech story had more detail, and since I can’t really talk about anything that isn’t public it is nice to see more details in a public forum.

Finally tonight on Linked In I saw a post by one of our VC’s David Mount. I really enjoyed his point and appreciated his kind comments on the team as it really was an amazing team to work with on this turn around and successful exit.

Wow! That was unexpected after my last post talking about my first year, but we found out on Monday that we were acquired. It is the goal of every startup to be acquired so I am proud to have taken part in a huge turn around of a business to have made that possible. We took a startup company that was losing money when I joined to one that was profitable today, and I was able to work with the strongest engineering team that I have ever worked with in my career which was hugely rewarding.

Since last September we were able to grow conversion by 25% and mobile enrollments by 40%. We are doing 100,000 enrollments a year and were able to build out the largest online B2B marketplace out there.

How were we able to do such a remarkable turnaround? We focused on two metrics conversions and revenue, and drove hard to pick off all the low hanging fruit and grow them. We redesigned our checkout funnels which allowed us to drastically lower error rates which allowed us to save 1/3 of all customer enrollments that previously would be lost due to errors and usability issues in the funnels. We streamlined and simplified our mobile experience resulting in many more mobile enrollments.

The other project we did which I was proud of was our 3rd microservice which I alluded to on the blog but hadn’t discussed in any depth. We started it back in January. It is a service to reconcile payments from our suppliers for all of the customer leads that we deliver to them. As far as we know it is the only automated system like this in the industry. WE could consume their reports and find which leads we hadn’t been paid for yet which results in much more revenue for the company. On top of that data we had begun to build a consumer facing dashboard so that they would be able to get status on their current enrollment and previous enrollments as well as renew their plan when their contract was coming to an end.

All in all, what a year. It has been a dramatic year of change and really a great year for me. The question now of course is what next. The acquiring company hasn’t yet made clear their plans for us so I am exploring my options now and figuring out what the next step for me in my journey will be. I am sad that the current role is changing as the team has just been so amazing I had hoped we would spend at least another year really ramping up the revenue before the board sold us just because I think we could have built some really neat things.

My First Year

I just celebrated my one year anniversary in my current position, which is a great opportunity to look back on the last year of work. This role has been unlike any other that I have had in my career starting from the interview.

When I was interviewing with my boss and we were discussing what I did in my previous role, I discussed the architecture that we had built. It was a traditional Spring application that was a monolith. It was a very well designed layered architecture. We were doing a mix Trunk Based Development and feature branch development depending on how large and invasive the feature was using git as the repository. We had a great unit test suite and did weekly deployments. We tried to commit early to master and use feature toggles to role out new features and mitigate risk. They were still largely a waterfall model though, just a company that moved faster on waterfall than any I have ever worked with.

In my interview I mentioned that what I was really interested in doing which was rolling out a micro service based architecture built around spring boot. It seemed to me at the time to be a great way to increase development velocity, and it allows experimenting with different patterns and techniques inside of a new project without necessarily committing to that in all of the code across the company.  To my bosses credit he was also extremely excited about the concept and I was informed a few hours later that they wanted to move forward with an offer. This was the first time in my career that I went into an interview with a strong vision of what I wanted to do as opposed to just being interested in learning more about a company to see if it was the right fit for me. I think this is something that I would carry forward into the future as it has had great results for me.

I started in my new role and the first week was getting my development environment setup and learning the new process. We use agile which I had not yet done in my career, and we use the gitflow model. After 5 days on the job I was given my first real project. I was going to write the first micro service that they had done in Spring Boot the way I had outlined my interest in my interview. And we would have 2 sprints to complete it. I was given the opportunity to make all the design decisions and implement the service and the rest of the team implemented the code to integrate with my service from the main application.

I have noticed as you move up in your career you are handed more responsibility much sooner when you join a new company. When I joined people answers I had about a month of doing bug fixes on various parts of the software before I was thrown on a major 3 month project to roll out a huge game changing feature at the company (mobile support for pre screening questions in our application tracking system). This time around it was doing a whole new Authentication and Authorization service 5 days into the job and designing the initial architecture that we were going to use to roll these services out in the future. Nothing is as exciting as green field development especially when you get to call all the architectural shots. It was really an amazing project all around as it gave me a chance to prove myself right away that I could walk the talk so to speak, and it is exciting work. You are already energized joining a new role and getting to implement your vision of how to take things forward from nearly day one does even more to let you know that you have made the right move in your career.

As the year has gone on we rolled out 2 more services with a different engineer leading each one. We build and expand on our architecture with the requirements of each new service that we roll out. Another unique thing about this opportunity for me has been getting to look into the business model and begin to understand how the business works. I have been involved in startup type work for much of my career, but I have never gotten to see a working business model up close. That has been very refreshing. Our product people have an amazing understanding of the business and how we the engineers can build new features to drive more value to the business. If you ever want to feel rewarded implement some new feature in a system and have the business come back to you and tell you how much revenue it brought in during the previous quarter. Typically software engineers get very few opportunities to actually hear a dollars and cents version of the kind of value that you are creating, which is a shame as it is very empowering. Some day I may want to try a CTO type role as I love technology leadership and engineering. I don’t feel like you can move into that type of role until you can sort of bridge the technology side with the business side, so I am fortunate to work with such a talented business team that doesn’t mind answering my simple questions related to the business.

I guess in conclusion the biggest take away for me is if you are considering a different role, think about how you could bring value to the business if you are given that role and articulate during the interview the value that you can provide. It may just end up being the most interesting role of your career.