Skip to main content

Torchpassing

I was working on the first part of the year on a project wherein the five-person team, there were members from Portugal and the US east coast.

Since we were on the starting time zone, the workday went as follows: We started to work here in Finland, where the US left off. They left a descriptive torch pass message on what they were doing, and we continued from there. At some point in the afternoon, the Portuguese joined, and we worked together. Our day ended in the daily, which was pretty much our torch pass to the US part of the team.

This resulted in pretty much 16-hour work cycles, or in other words, two shifts. It was very efficient for a couple of reasons

  • Strong team. We were all capable of independent work and made decisions on the fly.
  • Direction. We did not have detailed stories or Jira tickets, but the course was clear
  • Strong PO and scrum master. They protected us, and we did not waste any time in pointless meetings.



5/5 would recommend working in a team split across the globe. The requirements to make it are as stated above. On an individual developer level, aim to write explicit messages on your thought process to Slack and especially spend time thinking through the torch passing notes. List all your thoughts and crazy ideas you had and see if the next person in his/her shift will jump on it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

RocksDB data recovery

I recently needed to do some maintenance on a RocksDB key-value store. The task was simple enough, just delete some keys as the db served as a cache and did not contain any permanent data. I used the RocksDB cli administration tool ldb to erase the keys. After running a key scan with it, I got this error Failed: Corruption: Snappy not supported or corrupted Snappy compressed block contents So a damaged database. Fortunately, there's a tool to fix it, and after running it, I had access to the db via the admin tool. All the data was lost though. Adding and removing keys worked fine but all the old keys were gone. It turned out that the corrupted data was all the data there was. The recovery tool made a backup folder, and I recovered the data by taking the files from the backup folder and manually changing the CURRENT file to point to the old MANIFEST file which is apparently how RocksDB knows which sst (table) files to use. I could not access the data with the admin tool, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Making dashboards more usable for LLMs

I’ve been looking into agentic workflows to act as an operations assistant for the SaaS I'm working on. A big part of that work is getting the assistant to make sense of all the alert and monitoring data that pours in every day. Passing a bunch of raw time-series data to an LLM generally doesn’t work that well. You need to tell the LLM to aggregate the data and give it the means to do so. Using aggregates will often lead to better insights from the LLM. This is a well-known fact to anyone who has tinkered with this (at least at the time of writing this). Humans, of course, like to build visualizations and dashboards to solve this issue (yes, yes, dashboards are often useless, but complaining about that is another blog post). LLMs can analyze them as well and in fact are pretty good at that, so the aggregate can be something both humans and LLMs can digest. I’ve been tinkering with the idea of appending some LLM-only content to a dashboard—for example, additional context, specific d...
Post a Comment
Read more