tfnico's blog

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks.  And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes.  At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on  Git and continuous integ...

This is a post going into the usefulness of live voice-chat tools in distributed teams. If you've ever seen the Leeeeeroooooyy Jeeeenkiiins video of World of Warcraft fame, you've heard this kind of tool in action. It's how the participants in the video are speaking with each other - this is not a feature built into the World of Warcraft game - it's a separate team-oriented VoIP software, and it's all about letting gamers communicate orally while gaming.  Since these tools are for gamers, they have to be fast (low latency) light (as not to steal CPU-cycles from heavy games graphics)  moderate in bandwidth usage (as not to affect the game server connection) There are several options around: TeamSpeak , Ventrilo , more recently the massively grown Discord , and finally Mumble , which is the open-source alternative of the gang. A few years ago, when I joined eyeo (a distributed company), several of the operations team were avid gamers, and had a TeamSp...

This is another follow-up post on my first year at eyeo . In a company where the norm was to shun any hype, and avoiding cargo-culting by all means, it was not easy to use the language I had come to learn in the industry. Mentioning "Agile" would derail any discussion into shoot-downs, anecdotes and personal opinions and experiences. Few of the agile values, principles or practices were taken at face value. The more experienced colleagues had bad experiences with "agile transformations", and the large majority of younger colleagues had not recognized the pains of silofication , nor experienced the joy of successful organizational change. As is the norm these days, "DevOps" has already been reduced to infrastructure engineering. Scrum was a fad, XP forgotten, Kanban was a board on the wall. Sprints were pointless, we'd rather ship when there's a big enough reason to ship. Conway's and Little's laws were unknown, as were Lean, theory of c...

Note: This topic of this post was heavily inspired by The Phoenix Project and the succeeding tome of reference, The DevOps Handbook . There are many metrics out there that can guide you to improve your business, but in the upside-down world of Internet business, many of these can be plain wrong, or at least they do not serve well as guides for what you should be doing. If you measure success by measuring profit, for instance, you'll run out of good will with your users or partners very quickly. Then there are a load of more noble but fuzzy numbers that you can measure by surveying employees or users. Think employee-happiness, etc. While these are definitely useful, they are easy to get wrong, and it's easy to over-do it, causing survey fatigue. They're also hard to trace from cause to effect. It's hard to say which particular company decision lead to some satisfaction rating going down. Take the SWOT analysis  as a particular one of these surveys. It will give yo...

In my previous post , I suggested several topics to blog about, based on my experiences of 2017. How Silos Grow was the topic most asked for: This was my initial shock after joining the company. Only a few years after taking off as a startup, the hedges began growing, seemingly almost by themselves, and against the will of the founders. I've worked in silos, and in companies without them, but I haven't been there to witness them coming into existence before. It is a fascinating phenomenon, yet oh, so common. And a killer of great companies. This posts digs into why and how silos happen. It's a bit of a long one, so here's the TL;DR: It is about human nature. Departments are a good thing (for some things). People in different departments are inherently different. The project method is still problematic (and reinforces the silos). Cross-departmental teams should be the first-class organizational unit instead. Although the idea to write this came from my fir...

It's been well over a year since I  joined eyeo . And 'tis the season for yearly reviews, so... It's been pretty wild. So many times I thought "this stuff really deserves a bloggin", but then it was too inviting to grab onto the next thing and get that rolling. Instead of taking a deep dive into some topic already, I want to scan through that year in review and think for myself, what were the big things, the important things, the things I achieved, and the things I learned. And then later on, if I ever get around to it, grab one of these topics and elaborate in a dedicated blog-post. Like a bucket-list of the blog posts that I should have written. Here goes: How given no other structures, silos will grow by themselves This was my initial shock after joining the company. Only a few years after taking off as a startup, the hedges began growing, seemingly almost by themselves, and against the will of the founders. I've worked in silos, and in companies wit...

A couple of months ago I left Viaboxx, more than five years after I started there . It was a great ride. It combined the excitement and intensity of working at a startup, with the safety of working with a profitable, self-organizing company of experienced full stack developers. During the time there I worked with everything from Raspberry Pis to huge parcel stations, from single-page-webapp AngularJS applications and Node, to state-of-the-art modern Java-cloud applications. I learned how to do infrastructure-as-code with Puppet, and immutable infrastructure with Docker. We developed our own products, did research projects and provided consulting for big enterprises - always learning, always trying out new things. Being small allowed us to optimize for learning while having an awesome culture where colleagues felt like family or great friends. Still, a part of me missed some of the challenges I worked more with when I was consulting, or working for larger companies. Helping people...