Jakub Benes
@jukben
Chronological order of tweets which I consider carrying some value – mostly for my own reference.
Hacking dehumidifier to Homebridge
Today I bought a dehumidifier. I have a quite solid smart home already and Sonoff humidity/temperature sensor was reporting crazy numbers. Now with the dehumidifier (Tesla Smart Dehumidifier XL) it looks the Sonoff SNZB-02 sensor is ~10% off the reality. Haha.
Naturally, I would say the dehumidifier will have a better sensor, but who knows. Anyway. Since it's "smart" I went on a journey to reverse-engineer it to have it in Home app along with my other devices. Btw Proximan is an insanely awesome tool for network interception...
Human-first engineering interviews
If you are designing engineering interviews – don't forget to put humans first. 👩💻
I had a chance to explore the concept of async interviews, where you record your screen with a camera&voice on and try to crack the algorithm exercise within 30 mins.
Don't do it, not worth it.
The guidance goes as follows: it's a "real-life problem", but basically it's a leetcode-like thingy. You are allowed to google and do whatever you would normally do. But would you dare to google the exact problem? Would you use Github's Copilot? 🤷 I doubt it, but in a real life.
IC to EM; there and back again
So after more than 2 years in the engineering management track, I decided to do switch back to an IC role again to dive into (almost the same) problems from a bit different perspective. It feels super exciting. Like meeting a good old friend you experienced so much with. 🧵👇
It's something I was thinking about for some time already and I'm glad I was able to get the courage to do this, especially given the fact I'm doing it within the same organization. I truly believe everyone involved, including my ex-direct reports, got something from it.
CI for CI
We have joked that we need CI for CI because it happen to us that our pipeline update broke our main pipeline (hard to test it from the feature pipeline, right 🤓). Luckily @kepkap found out there is an API for that docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/lint.html
💭 Thoughts on Dev Containers in VSCode
I finally got my hands on Dev Containers in #VSCode and it's pretty solid! I decided to put some effort into learning Ruby so I thought it would be nice to explore it and try to use it for my use case so I avoid polluting my whole setup. Here are my learnings. 👇🧵
First of all, what is it all about? Dev containers basically let you use a Docker container as a full-featured development environment. Great thing is that it works flawlessly with extensions, they can run in the context of the container with access to files and platform.🚀
Continuous delivery and outdated clients
Releasing in continuous delivery fashion is nice... but how do you deal with outdated clients? What's your strategy for it? We do several deploys per day (+-30) and although it's nice to be able to iterate so fast it also creates some challenges.👇🧵
We are releasing the first bits of GraphQL into production, to be concrete we are trying to gradually roll it out to prevent some big mistakes. You know the drill; 5%, 10%, 20%... 🤨 . We soon realized we missed one data loader and we also refactored the query to ask for less.
My recipe for successful technical initiatives
I had a chance to drive a couple of major technical initiatives in a rapidly growing startup. I joined as #35 and the company grew 10x since then. I still have plenty to learn, though, I have a few tips which I would appreciate a few years ago. So I'm sharing them with you now.
Usually, such initiatives are quite a big spanning. It's essential to keep the momentum by being able to break it down into smaller parts – milestones that are deliverable within one quarter or faster. And don't forget to celebrate them!