Devibe Podcast

We met with Lukas Sliwka, CTO at Grindr, in their West Hollywood office to learn more about what it takes both from the team and from his leadership to scale up a backed stack to meet 3.2 Million DAUs (Daily Active Users). We covered so many things, including: How the to scale the Grindr stack from 800,000 and to millions of DAUs and how a near crisis was handled over a holiday in a remote starbucks parking lot. We also learned how the combination of the performance and low maintenance needed to keep infrastructure in place made led Grindr’s engineering team to consolidate their databases to Amazon Aurora. On failure, we learned about Lukas’s thesis on failing fast, but almost as important, trusting the executive team to carry their message forward and ensure that the entire engineering team can fail fast and improve. We also learned lessons from a “big bang rewrite” decision, including its impact on new functionality and market competitiveness. We looked carefully at the evolution of Lukas’s leadership and how a management thesis that blends operations, culture and technology changes over time. In the beginning of Luka’s career at Grindr he focused on technology (ie still writing code) and as he matured, he focused more on operations (ie what processes and metrics), and as the team grew, he focused more on culture (ie pushing the button on every single technical hire for culture) On setting out for success (or failure), we learned what it takes to be successful at Grindr: curiosity and willingness to experiment and try new things. Carefully looking for this trait has allowed both new and veteran talent to adopt really quickly. On goal setting, we learned that a combination of practical planning and brute force has been a proven methodology for Lukas. For Lukas, goal setting starts the evening before by setting a few key objectives. Brute force is not natural but a necessity in order to execute on what needs to get done. We also learned how hitting the gym at 5:15 and waiting to check emails until after the workout sets a practical work life balance for Lukas. On luck, we spoke about how to stack the deck in your favor, particularly by investing into the right communities, such as meetups, and building the right relationships with interests that genuinely resonate. On balancing life interest such as motorcycling and relationships, Lukas reflects on mistakes he made early on by not putting a priority on delegation. We also covered how having a correctly well defined outcome helps to call it quits or a success. Squishy targets prevents making the proper risk assessments and analysis.

We met with Karim Varela, CTO at Coffee Meets Bagel, in their San Francisco office, right off of Market St., and had the opportunity to learn more about the leadership, team, and beliefs that enable Karim’s team to build a consistently high quality product. We covered many things including : Android vs IOS app. If you’re trying to build a global scale app, you should start on Android (80% of the market share globally). If your goal is start making money from rich Americans, than start on iOS. On pursuing a career in tech, and how San Francisco is great, but not the only place. Starting off in Portland, Karim worked out of hacker houses in Bali, Costa Rica, as well as working full time in Los Angeles for Tinder before making the move to San Francisco. At Coffee Meets Bagel, Karim manages an active team of engineers both in their offices in San Francisco, as well as remote teams. How the re-airing of a pitch to Mark Cuban on Shark Tank impacts traffic by 2 to 3 times the normal load. How building a side project with 10 people (!!!) impacted product quality and marketing, and ultimately affected the project’s ability to get funded. It’s so hard to get focus on delivering really good work while staying on top of all of the pieces together. What separates a hobby from a business is the willingness to sacrifice everything or figuring out how to do it full time. How collaboration yields great ideas but doesn’t all lead to a better product. What makes the difference is getting your head down and getting real work done. Although collaboration is great the frequency and attendee volume of collaborative meetings can strangle engineering productivity. How agile software is great in speeding time to market, but doesn’t always lead to the best result. In many cases agile software can be used to justify carelessness and hastily defined product requirements. We also want behind the scenes on philosophy including objective morality vs the golden rule and how this influences decision making both in professional and privately and when is it time to say “I quit.”

In 2010, Seth Haley, a creative director in New York finally gained traction with his synth wave project Com Truise. Called one of the best musical artist to code to, the Com Truise project has become popular with both engineers and the general public for its 80s style, synthetic, and rich beats. We met Com Truise in San Francisco and discovered a strong connection in the habits, routines, and interests that help both create great music and durable code, including Focusing on the most important thing to get one in the day from 5:00AM to 1:00PM without interruption from email, social media, or the internet. How simple the music actually is despite sounding complex Completing the body of a new tracks in one sitting by surrounding himself with silence. We covered many topics, including: Early beginnings working as an art director in NYC Sneaking as a drum and bass DJ back in the day 1:45 Where “Com Truise” came from Downtempo vs synth wave music 5:00 Inspiration behind the music from Neon Indian, Prince, Michael Jackson, and others 5:30 How the first mix tapes started with Block Rocking Beats by the Chemical Brothers, a casio keyboard, 8:00 Starting “Elite Radio” online radio station 9:30 Finding success in music 10:30 Waking up at 5:00AM to get stuff done 11:30 Probiotics, coconut water, and coffee to charge the batteries 12:00 Sitting for 20 minutes in the backyard 13:00 How focusing on producing a track from start to finish in one sitting helps to him to focus and get things done 17:00 Gear that he uses 18:00 How the space around him influences the output of his music 18:30 Impact that music blogs in early 2010s influenced music discovery and 20:00 How posting authentic content over instagram is more valuable than explicit promotional content and twitter 22:00 Overstimulation of content 23:00 When Seth isn’t on the road or producing music, he’s actually an avid fan and learner of grilling and baking.

Avi Zurel (Twitter - @kensodev | Github - @kensodev) is Senior Engineer at Trip.com based in Silicon Valley. Avi came to Silicon Valley two years ago with his family after working for four years remotely from Tel Aviv. He says he joined Trip.com because the technology was new and the product was exciting and his specialty is in scaling companies up. Trip.com invited him to come aboard. “Is the technology holding the product back or is the product holding itself back? The question you really need to ask is does it matter” - Avi Zurel Coding since age 14, before joining Gogobot, Avi ran a consultancy on his own in Israel. A family man, he and his wife have three children, 6, 4, and 1. He works part time in the office and part time from home in order to be with them more. He is also a competitive cyclist, enjoying weekend races in the Bay Area. When asked about challenges he faced as an engineer, Avi talked of infrastructure, code deployment, and intrapersonal skills. He easily owned up to his failures, most of which centered on people skills. His mantra for combating the pressure and stress to perform in coding and engineering is to ask “Does it matter?”. It all comes back to that for Avi, separating what matters from what doesn’t, what affects the bottom line and the customer or client and choosing your battles. This transfers to his personal life with family as well. When working from home, one of his key weapons against distractions is a command line called “GET SHIT DONE” that disables distracting websites and keeps him focused. We cover many technical topics including: Why he moved from Tel Aviv Israel to Silicon Valley 0:48 Motivation to join Trip.com and the how getting trusted travel reviews were so hard 3:00 Fires and “melting servers” 4:00 First experience coding with HTML 6:00 Why Trip.com chose to work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) from day one 8:00 Managing the challenge between serving “producing” users and “consuming” users at scale 10:30 Deploying edge servers to meet global demand 12:00 Cache deployment via memcached over dedicated servers and membase 13:00 Making the decision to use Amazon Web Service Elasticache 13:15 How to deploy code without affecting the end user experience 15:00 Handling Techcrunch traffic without affecting the user experience 15:10 How to scale up without making the database a bottleneck 15:30 Changing the database architecture Negotiating with other stakeholders to halt new feature development to stabilize code 19:30 Finding out what matters vs just being a hard person to work with 23:30 Career advice on code reviews between engineers and managers 25:00 Learning from failure: engineering as a consultant vs employee 26:00 Learning from failure: direction communication as an Israeli vs conventional communication in the Valley 27:00 How to improve communication skills as an engineer both online and off 29:00 How to motivate people to get things done without being too aggressive 30:00 When launching features that are not 100% perfect makes sense for learning 31:00 Enforcing zero compromises on code if it would have any negative effect on revenue or partner value Bringing the team together to learn from mistakes, open a discussion, and to learn how to ensure that it won’t happen again 35:00 If you point a finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you” 37:00 How to manage a TB MongoDB cluster. 38:00 When failure means that mobile battery dies and you’re abroad 38:00 When managing a black ops dev project makes sense 47:00 How Trip.com uses 250 AWS lambda functions in production 52:00 Why using AWS products makes more sense 58:00 Need to see 50%+ in cost savings in order to even consider another cloud 1:01 Opens source tools to check out, including riak and javascript based tools 1:03 1:05

The fascinating Manik Surtani has joined the Devibe podcast today for an in depth conversation about some of the biggest issues in data and tech today. Manik Surtani (Twitter: @maniksurtani | Github: maniksurtani) is a software engineer at Square and one of the leading experts on data grids and distributed computing. He is the founder of the open source data grid project Infinispan and his book Infinispan Data Platform is considered by many to be the definitive introduction on the subject. Before tackling the data storage challenges at Square, Manik was the Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. A recent transplant to San Francisco, we discuss Manik's globe spanning career from Sri Lanka to London and beyond. As expected, Manik has great insights on data architecture, startup growth and scaling challenges, the future of open source, and building incredible teams. Manik is an avid outdoorsman and shared his favorite rock climbing spots in the Alps and why Yosemite was a big reason for moving to California. If you are considering a big move or just trying to figure out the best way to solve your data problems, then this episode of Devibe is a must listen. Highlights: The growth and scaling challenges that motivated Manik to join Square. Childhood misadventures with bootleg floppy disks in Sri Lanka. The challenge of right-sizing backend architecture. Monoliths vs. microservices. Challenges of 32 bit intingers over MySQL How to overhaul mission critical code base. Tips for scaling your database with organic growth in mind. How to know if NoSQL is the right choice for you. The future of open source databases, including CockroachDB. The industry wide problem of tech debt and what it means. Balancing code hygiene with business pressures. When should a startup address tech debt? Learning to distinguish a code failure from product direction failure. The unique startup environment at Square. Experiments in serverless architecture. Cultural adjustment in morning productivity routines. Reverse engineering a culture of trust. Mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps. Pro and Cons of moving to San Francisco. Robots and wealth distribution.

Tung Nguyen (Twitter tongueroo | Github tongueroo ) is an elite software engineer who as first technical hire at Bleacher Report, led and executed a technology roadmap supporting the company’s growth from an obscure sports blog to one of the world’s most popular sport news sites today. He has a tremendous amount of experience using cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a wide skill set in using open source tools to quickly scale. We covered everything from how “Lebron Decision” presented a major technical challenge, how bad 90s electronic music set a precedent for focusing in a noisy environment, how to get things done working from home with four daughters, how important mentors are in shaping your career, morning habits that power you to get things done, why Richard Branson wasted his time in a hot air balloon instead of witnessing the birth of his child, and so much more. Enjoy the full podcast to immerse yourself into a well rounded discussion on how to architect your stack for massive scalability, home balance, nutrition, and the future of software engineering. If you’re looking for a quick hit, skip to this highlights: How humble beginnings helped Tung to achieve so much more 13:00 How a 9 month hard knock job got his foot into the big league 14:00 First experience coding 16:00 First day and first hire at Bleacher Report 20:00 How to make the a career decision and transition 24:00 Expanding B/R at scale 25:00 Solving engineering challenges caused by the “Janet Jackson Halftime,” Super Bowl power out,” and “Lebron decision” 26:00 Mitigating risks by benchmarking traffic 30:00 Testing on production on a static S3 site vs staging 31:00 Finding and addresses bottlenecks 35:00 Architecting for 4 billion push notifications 36:00 Tools and technologies including Redis, MemcacheD, Rub, Node.js, Amazon Web Services and much more 37:00 On the challenges for building a cloud agnostic platform 38:00 Must have services on Amazon Web Services 40:00 Naming conventions and policies for building 45:00 Handling failure: learning from success vs failing fast 47:00 Handling the NFL crash with a slow query 48:00 Brutal honesty and doing better 50:00 Team building also involves after hours relationship building 51:00 When engineers speaking to end users make sense 53:00 Goal setting and payscale 55:00 Lessons learned from terminating staff 56:00 Will microservices solve all of your problems? 59:00 Creating an environment to get stuff done 1:04 The dark side of coding: dealing with constant change 1:08 Impact of old age: how to keep up as you get older in your career 1:09 Favorite books 1:11 Eliminating distraction and reigning in the focus 1:13 How a house of four daughters influences music choices 1:14 Office vs home environment to get things done (home with 4 daughters!) 1:17 Importance of mentors and the how to build a skill set with them 1:20 Is waking up at 5:00 a game changer in getting things done? 1:23 Balancing nutrition and sleep to perform better in software engineering 1:27 Making time time for kids 1:34 Effect of hacking elementary English by learning characters by site vs phonetics 1:35 Challenge of prioritizing family, kids, and work 1:38 Separating work from home vs. going all in 1:41 What was Richard Branson was doing what while missing the birth of his child? 1:42 Who wears the pants in a house where Tung is the only male? 1:45 Severless architecture and containers 1:52 Devops engineering success in the enterprise is a cultural or engineering challenge? 2:04 Advice for beginners: you already know more than you think you know 2:06 The benevolent dictator and the commitment for life 2:09 A books mentioned in the show Growth Mindset Never Eat Alone How to Win Friends and Influence People The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

Forget about wasting costly attention, time, and money on events and pre-produced televised casts. Devibe is a podcast series for backend engineers, techies, and investors building web and mobile applications. We decode engineering experts behind some of the most complex, high performing, and scalable stacks to find what challenges they face, what technologies they love and use, and their real life is like behind the code. You will learn: * How to apply open source and and cloud technologies to solve real business use cases * How to architect your application for scale, availability, and performance. * How the person behind the code looks a work-life balance and personal relationships