Daily Archives: June 12, 2015

here be dragons; container security – josh bregman

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This is part of my live blogging from QCon 2015. See my QCon table of contents for other posts.

Risks

Need to prevent

  • “good” containers calling you accidentally
  • “good” containers calling you without your permission
  • “bad” containers calling you

production only workflow is an anti-pattern. network security isn’t enought

DevOps is about veleocity. Security and Risk Management can put on the brakes

Pod suurounds separation of concerns. Each actor (security, dev, etc) has own space

Can organize containers into layers

At event, can have ticket in advance or “will call” where show id. The later is like dynamic tokens.

Use host factory when provisioning

Impressions: the original speaker is sick and the subtitute has been at the company five weeks. I wouldn’t have know if he hadn’t mentioned it. I think I don’t know enough about containers though because some of this went over my head.

developing cultural inteligence – daniel seltzer – qcon

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This is part of my live blogging from QCon 2015. See my QCon table of contents for other posts.

people aren’t logical. need to understand people; not just technology

with kids, you are creating a culture in your family. it’s about what you do, not what you say. modeling behavior. nice to see it played back to you as kids grow.

culture matters because:

  • shapes how people work togther
  • makes comanies great
  • to blame when people not doing right things anymore
  • powerful tool for new solutions

people need to be empowered and responsible

nobody should be allowed to treat others badly

culture in tech is creating shared expections for behavior

when something bad happens, does someone say not ok. if not, it becomes ok. culture is the accumulation of lessons like this

No manual on culutre. So learn to recognize, reason about and affect culture around you. In time, you gain the confidence to develop culture.

Conway’s law – structure of the architecture comes to reflect the organization of the company.

rules not written down, but we all know about the culture where we work

culture happens in real time – boundaries between people/groups, unexpected challenges, discovering the rules, rituals that reinforce, fear/anger/surprise/punishment/reward, stories are repeated

leaders set culture whether good or bad. if you set the culture, you became the leader

Once show dialog in team, info starts to flow in different ways.

“need to know” means “you aren’t going to know”

If had an API for culture:

Upper bound (ideal)

Attribute Default value Upper bound (ideal)
Control Centralized Distributed
Information Private Shared
Emotion Ego Empathy
Responsibility Avoidance Empath
Dissent Unacceptable Encouraged
Motivation extrinsic intrinsic
Planning risk based reality based
Humor serious playful
recognition taking credit giving credit
org structure static dynamic
collaboration fraught efective
risk avoid engage actively
truth to power dangerous supported

What can you do?

  • What is your personal culture
  • Choose positive culture over other rewards
  • Ask about culture on interview
  • Develop confidence to speak up when group and personal culture conflict.Thereare other places to go
  • Choose people for culturl fit. Model values you want to establish. Avoid ambiguity

Q & A

  • How handle public situations? People can only change so fast. “Let’s talk about this later.” Discuss one on one. Explain why a larger issue as group. Values group embodies are in conflict with your action. Choice of bringing closer to those values or looking for something new to do. Can progogate message via someone else on team in a softer/less direct way.
  • What do if team culture is in conflict with org culture? Doesn’t matter; have to be prepared to leave as leader to endorse values – those values are that important. Will cause conflict with values/goals of organization.
  • Culture takes time to develop. What if planting wrong seeds and waiting 6 months to find out? Takes time for person, but can still get team results faster. If inherit group, can take time. Will probably lose most of those people
  • When culture improves, people still have bitterness about past. How deal with that? Harder when not starting from scratch. Bigger organization limits how much one person can change. Even if CEO. Hard to change. Person has to want to change.
  • Fluid org structure. How switch teams when different culture on different teams? More about adapting over time. In startup, rate of change is so high, that changes daily/weekly. Don’t want people who will be upset if job/job title changes.
  • How balance against getting super talented engineers? So hard to find tech talent that becomes a moot question. Better to get lesser skilled engineer who will be productive and a good fit. Want someone who will pair rather than impeed team work.
  • What ask at interview to judge culture? Look at body language – eye contact, body language, flushing skin, talk to team members not just managers. Or ask, what would you do if X or tell me a story about X.
  • How “infect” organization to change? Person who cares ,know what is important, talks about it, etc. If people want it, they infect others as well. If in conflict with org values, need top down change

results driven deveopment and mobile – aaron glazer – qcon

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This is part of my live blogging from QCon 2015. See my QCon table of contents for other posts.

Building a mobile app is like a Formula One car. Someone else creates the rules. People care about how you perform, not the internals.

Results driven means working with all areas (sales, marketing, tech, etc) to achieve a common goal.

Data on it’s own isn’t useful.Needs focus.

Clarity thrugh simplicity. Simplicity alone is not enough.

A typical analytics graph shows dips/peaks over time. But don’t know what. Was a feature released then? Did new copy change your ranking in google? Did features have a delayed effect? Were externalities driving the result? Did features have any effect?

Instead do A/B testing to focus on causation instead of correlation.

In physical store, 75% of users pull out phone and 25% of those buy online rather than in store standing in.

After 1 day after downloading, 15% of users still use app. After a month,only 2% do. This inludes paid and unpaid apps.

On stubhub, see 400 words on desktop, mobile 30 words, Apple watch 5 words. Target has same scale: 500/50/7. On smaller device, word worth more.

A/B testing more important on mobile because less opportunity to hook user.

A/B Testing Walkthrough
Know goal.
Setup distribution. 50% baseline 50% varation
Segmentation: only show to users meeting target audience

Results Driven Development

  • Everyone must work together – Isolating the mobile team is bad. The engineering team controls app, but not accountable for user retention and other business goals. In results driven, havve a cross functional team. Center team around checkout flow, not platform.
  • Get the right tool for the job
  • Ensure accountability is directed properly
  • Data gives you information, but need goal. Results gives you answers.
  • Choose contextual business metric. Hypothesize/test/improve

Q & A

  • How do A/B testing on mobile? Can build multiple apps within an app and toggle.Can use Taplytics (is company) to change dynamically
  • There were two other questions, but they dried up fast

Impressions: The stats were interesting. I feel like i’ve heard most of the remaining info before.