As business moves forward, technology expands into new concepts and applications of theory, and Ifbyphone is no exception. Unlike most startups we hear about these days, creating solutions with the latest technologies, developing new markets and the freedom of a clean backlog. We find ourselves at Ifbyphone with technical debt, established customer expectations and a backlog of tasks that can be daunting on a good day. This isn’t to say these challenges are insurmountable. They do, however, pose not so unique challenges; for every aspect of the company. Luckily we have a great team of software engineers and support staff working hard each day to distill the backlog to the most valuable sprint tasks each week so that we may deliver the most value to our customers.
Recently we have begun several initiatives to bring more stability and agility to our development process, including upgrading software, implementing new platform services and implementing peer code reviews. Of the new platform services recently implemented or that are in the process of implementation are: Redis, Zend Server, CometD, MongoDB, MySQL, Amazon Web Services, RabbitMQ, Puppet, OAuth2 and others. Working with a list of technologies such as this is daunting when you consider the imperative goal of not introducing any service outages. This requires vast amounts of planning, testing and preparation, but most importantly communication. Communication with one another, with our customers, and with our upstream providers is key to a successful endeavor; all of which leads us to further expand our list of initiatives to modernize and improve our services and provide a great service to our clients. We have implemented improved database change control, software deployments and continuous integration; however we are still looking forward by planning to address such challenges as improved reporting, improved statistical analysis, capacity scaling, monitoring, security enhancements and many more enhancements.
We are not nor do we believe we are unique in these challenges: many companies around the world are faced with similar obstacles. The difference is often times the application of theory, money and manpower. Mistakes are made, but the lessons gleaned from them are invaluable to growth and progress. The greatest lessons learned are the seemingly obvious ones; where one looks back and wonders, “Why (or how) did we let this happen?” Our most recent efforts have been focused on database improvements: upgrading hardware and versioning, but also updating legacy code to implement more efficient database drivers. Vast quantities of code have been refactored: the entire team was sequestered in a conference room for multiple days to peruse diff files and perform peer code reviews. It was challenging, tedious and monotonous, yet successful. The lessons we are able to take away from this are such:
- Do not let fear paralyze the progress; it only gets harder the longer you wait.
- Keep the team involved. Large projects should always have full team involvement.
- Succeed as a team or fail as a team.
- Communicate with one another. While sequestering the team in a room is not always the preferred method of team interaction; the simple act of shared hardship can foster camaraderie.
I am a big fan of peer code reviews and this particular undertaking has only served to bolster my support of this process: both the reviewer and the reviewed can take from each session many lessons that go well beyond the simple technicalities of the code. The junior reviewer learns restraint and constructive mentorship of the peer developers he has reviewed; while from the senior developers being reviewed, he/she learns to be more assertive and prepared in getting results ‘without authority.’ This collectively provides a great opportunity and experience in their career. As developers being reviewed, we learn to interact with each other in harmonious ways, to openly communicate our goals and methods. We are at times humbled and learn to put aside our egos (
Today at Ifbyphone we have many projects well underway and even more on the backlog; there are no shortages of challenges to be undertaken, and frankly I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am fortunate to be in a place professionally where I absolutely love what I do: I am challenged daily, work with a great group of people and have excellent leaders to keep me on track. Over the years I have learned that the best jobs are often the hard ones and all of those constraints of technical debt that pose the greatest challenge—while frustrating—give the greatest rewards.