Engineering

I often wonder if I’m being effective at my job. Might be related to my impostor syndrome, but in engineering management, the signals of effectiveness aren’t always clear. I have some basic, high level criteria I try to think about monthly, or so, to provide some insight.

I had posted about the way Tumblr uses time-series monitoring to alert on crash spikes in the Android and iOS applications. Since then, we’ve done a lot of work to reduce the overall volume of crashes. As a result, we created a new problem: it was possible for a handful of people, caught in crash cycles, to cause our stability alerts to trigger.

There is a lot of information about engineering productivity out there. No one says it’s easy, but it can be downright difficult to turn the practices you hear about into plans you can put into action. What follows is an example of how we can create an actionable plan to increase our productivity.

I tried to push a plan for bootstrapping an automated integration test system for our Android and iOS applications. The plan was based on similar strategies I’d used, or seen used, at other companies. It didn’t fit well with the current situation and workflows. I failed to take those differences into account and the initiative failed.