_ Case studies and best practices for engineering leaders

Engineering Leader’s blog

Learn from some of the most accomplished engineering leaders. This blog brings you key insights from fellow engineering managers and tech leaders to level-up your management skills and to take your developer team to the next level.

5+ Reasons to Use Selenium with Docker for Application Testing

by Suraj Vijayaraghavan / September 13, 2018

Application testing is a key element to make sure your web applications run smoothly, as it tells you whether the tested scenario works without a hitch and the features run as validated. High test coverage, code reviews and pull requests are required for a fast pace and high-quality code. Docker gives you the best of this because you can run your tests in containers or isolate them in development and deployment.

Lack of Motivation Could Kill Your Software Team. Here's How to Fix It!

by Tyler Hakes / August 30, 2018

When it comes to software development, we talk a lot about the “hard” skills. Raw talent, individual intelligence, knowledge of frameworks and libraries. We all know these are important. But we often forget about the role of “soft” skills. At the end of the day, every software developer is human. (At least, for now.) As humans, we are driven and affected by more than just our abilities and IQ. Psychological and human elements play a huge role in the ability of a developer to do their job. One of the biggest factors is how individuals on a team feel about the work they’re doing. Do they feel invested and energized? Or are they just there to punch the clock and collect their paycheck?

The Dangers of Scaling Development Processes Before They’re Defined

by Adam Henshall / August 23, 2018

Processes help us determine the best ways to do things and then make sure we repeat that approach again and again and again. This makes it easier to achieve success, find problems in current approaches, and to add new people to your teams. 

Having clearly defined and well documented processes means the training and onboarding of new developers don’t need to be so micromanaged and can bring fresh developers up to the point of creating value for the business even faster.

But when is a team ready to add new members? When and how do we add people into this process in a way they can contribute? 

The Serverless Security Conundrum: Who Manages Security?

by Tal Melamed / August 16, 2018

The idea of ‘serverless’ is NOT about removing the servers completely (or you couldn’t use the internet at all), but essentially paying for services that mean that someone else manages the servers for you, thereby reducing maintenance load…

Not having access to the server can make things harder, but not impossible. And it’s not necessarily wrong, just different.

And the same applies to securing serverless apps. In some ways, it’s easier than securing traditional web apps. In other ways, it’s harder. And in yet other ways, it’s merely different. 

In this post, we’ll summarize these key differences and help you secure serverless apps.

How this Fast-growing Tech Company Manages Developers

by Tamás Török / August 8, 2018

It’s a huge challenge keeping and growing an engineering team. You need to take care of hiring, figure out how to retain developers as long as possible in the team and also figure out the work process and making sure the new developer managers are ready to take responsibility for their teams. In pursuit of uncovering good practices, we started a blog post series, featuring cool tech companies. Our intention wasn’t to find the ultimate silver bullet for every kind of organizational problems but to provide small case studies you can learn from. This case study is about a fast growing medium-sized tech company called Alpha.

Anatomy of a High-performing Developer Team

by Tamás Török / July 12, 2018

What makes a high-performing developer team different from a low-performing one?

In this post, we extracted actionable insights from the State of Software Development 2018 report to reveal some cool stats about high-performing teams.

You will see how top teams attract, hire and retain talents and by what standards they measure performance. In some cases, the difference between high- and low-performing teams is also highlighted.

Testing Distributed Systems: Case Studies from the Pros

by Tamás Török / June 14, 2018

Figuring out how to test complex, distributed systems causes a lot of headaches. And the thing is, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Distributed systems serve a specific need, so its architecture is built in a way to serve that business need. Chances are, the testing methods vary as well, and I haven’t even mentioned the number of independent services that also influences the testing methodology. 

Since it’s impossible to come up with a universal answer for testing distributed systems, we did interviews with 6 cool tech leaders to reveal their methods of testing. 

In this post, they will talk about how their systems work and the methods they use to test them.

How Tech Companies Motivate Developers to Join and Stay at Their Company

by Tamás Török / May 17, 2018

There is huge competition for talented developers. As a developer or tech lead, you have probably experienced this by receiving countless offers through LinkedIn or personal recommendations. Hiring new developers is hard. There aren’t enough developers on the market, and you’re competing for talent with big tech companies such as Facebook and Google who have much bigger resources.