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- Letting change and uncertainty advance your software architecture
Letting change and uncertainty advance your software architecture
#62 – November 08, 2021
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this week's favorite
The first lines of CircleCI’s codebase were written nearly nine years ago. Throughout those years, three themes emerged that have helped us become resilient in the face of the unknown: deferring the need to handle change, thinking like a product manager, and keeping your head up.
It’s your first day as a software engineer and you’re excited to start your first commit. As your new co-worker Bill shows you around the codebase, you can’t help but notice how often Bill answers notifications on his phone. “Do you want to continue later?”, you ask. “Nah it’s just that I’m on-call this week. Don’t worry I’m used to it - those are not that important”. You’re a little perplexed but, as the phone vibrations keep rattling your desk, you let Bill show you the innerworkings of BigCo’s codebase.
I’m writing this article for the nice people in leadership roles. By the meaning of the word “nice,” such people are kind, polite, and friendly. They generally trust the goodness of the people they lead. They are not usually difficult to work with, care for others, are patient, and listen. They venture to be vulnerable. You don’t hesitate to approach them.
Cloudflare provides a broad range of products — ranging from security, to performance and serverless compute — which are used by millions of Internet properties worldwide. Often, these products are built by multiple teams in close collaboration and delivering them can be a complex task. So ever wondered how we do so consistently and safely at scale?
“When I was younger, I really liked the idea of building a perfect system and engineering something really perfectly. And that’s nice in the world of computer science and engineering and in the abstract, but pragmatically, you’re at a company with a budget,” says Grèze, Head of Engineering at fintech startup Plaid. “You have a timeline by which you need to deliver something, or your competitors will deliver something faster. You have a lot of constraints. And in that world, great engineering is about solving business problems faster and better than your competitors can — and that just boils down to pragmatism.”