Your job as an engineer is to make yourself unnecessary.

A fun story 👇
We built a caching system for a slow 3rd party that our ops team uses to do stuff. Sometimes webhooks take 30min to tell us the cache needs updating.

Eh whatever, they set up well in advance. This isn’t a problem

And then ...
Hey we did this thing and it isn’t instantly showing up!!

Yeah it wouldn’t. Wasn’t designed to.

BUT WE NEED IT!!!!!111one

💩

Okay, we’ll clear the cache for ya. Ping us when you need us
The requests became constant. Many per day. Often with 30min of back-and-forth as the ops and eng teams tried to sync up and ensure the cache is cleared at just the right time.

It sucked.

And only 3 of us knew how to do this. Others wanted to help, couldn’t. 🙃
One day I had enough of this shit and wrote an SOP (standard operating procedure)

When ops says X, do Y, say Z, verify it worked.

Everyone could help, yay! And now the whole eng team was distracted 🤣
We lobbied our PM for a feature. PLEASE make time between features to build a bandaid for this problem

This sprint she did 🥳

An afternoon of translating the SOP into code and now there’s a DO THE THING button. Ops needs us no more and everyone’s happy
This is why engineers are so valuable — we build assets, not run the day-to-day

swizec.com//blog/why-engi…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Swizec Teller published ServerlessHandbook.dev

Swizec Teller published ServerlessHandbook.dev Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Swizec

2 May
When Americans don’t understand how Europians can have such strong feelings about ethnicity when “everyone looks the same”

lol amateurs
Racism in Europe is such a tricky topic *because* it's hard to draw a line.

Are Spanish people brown? Of course not
They became brown by creating Mexico ... waitaminute 🤔

Greeks are white yes?
Are Turks white?
Gets tricky because of the christian-muslim divide
I think most people would say Turkey is white.

Okay what about Syria? It's parallel to Cyprus on the map. Is Cyprus white?

What about North Africa in general. Especially Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, etc. White or brown? 🤨
Read 9 tweets
2 Mar
Variants – a quick tip for better React components

A pattern I've seen lots is adding a bunch of booleans to cover different use-cases of a reusable #React component. This makes components hard to use

A variant prop has worked great so far 🧵

swizec.com/blog/variants-…
You start with a smol reusable component

Then it grows, you boolean all the things ImageImage
And your component blows up in complexity. At 3 bools you have 8 different ways to hold your component.

You think you'll get it right every time? Debugging becomes into a game of whack-a-mole Image
Read 6 tweets
19 Jan
Got so close to working Firebase support in useAuth last night I can almost smell it 🤞

here's a recap 🧵

swizec.com/blog/codewiths…
We finished the stream with a broken flow. A callback doesn't callback, very strange.

And we found that Firebase is "hot garbage" as @tannerlinsley called it. Confusing API, strange docs, odd types.

Worst part of working with Firebase is Google's SEO.

Paste error into Google, get the docs. Docs don't even mention the error. 🙊
Read 5 tweets
23 Jun 20
Been having an interesting debate about "managing up" with some friends this morning and interesting patterns cropped up

👇
1) Managing up with a bad manager feels like you're doing their job. You aren't, but it feels like you are.

This is when folks are most frustrated and complain. It sucks for everyone involved.

Manager thinks you're unmanageable. You think manager just gets in the way.
2) Managing up with a great manager feels like Just Communication.

They set direction and talk company priorities.
You decide how to achieve those priorities, communicate blockers and hiccups, proactively say what's up, and keep the manager informed.
Read 6 tweets
17 Feb 19
Some fun stats from product sidehustle land 👇

Since March 2015

2695 hours
1.8 hrs/day average

3-ish products
~2800 sales
$139,208 revenue post fees
$81,767 expenses

$21/hour 🤔

This must be why most people share only the revenue numbers #open
Now the obvious question: Why would anyone do this?

Well for starters it's still better than a coding job back home. My first job building websites was for $7/hour.

That was in high school.
I eventually got better jobs, yes. Mostly thanks to moving into freelancing, being picky about clients, and choosing to work for foreign clients (primarily US startup land) whenever possible.

That got me to about $70,000/year. It was great. Lived like a king.
Read 14 tweets
5 Apr 18
LEARN WHILE YOU POOP: Why you should learn React 🧐

Hi 👋 I’m trying something new and need your feedback. What do you think of this as a format for a daily 2min video?

No pressure learning at 2 minutes per day.Start with WHY React all the way to a React 16.3 master in a month.
LEARN WHILE YOU POOP: Why are components so great 🤔

React, Vue, Angular, or whatever. Components are the future and you should learn how to think in them. Here's why 👇

Hint: it's a lot like LEGO except you also have a 3D printer to make your own.
LEARN WHILE YOU POOP 3
How JSX makes your life easier 👇

Some still debate it, but I love how JSX lets you get in there and get your hands dirty right with the stuff your code is meant to be outputting. Like a top chef 👩‍🍳 gently massaging a steak. 🥩
Read 31 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!