Skip to main content

Journal: This Month I Learned (2023-April)

I learned that it's important to take breaks and practice self-care to avoid burnout. It's also important to communicate with colleagues and managers about workload and prioritize tasks accordingly. Finally, getting hands-on experience with different aspects of the business can be valuable for personal and professional growth.

OKRs review

The results of the OKR review should not directly impact performance appraisals. Key Results should be straightforward measurements of Objectives, not just a to-do list. They should also be related to daily work, rather than separate topics.

There are two ways to review objectives: "Completion" or "Rating".

The status should be balanced among objectives and used to adapt to current efforts.

Member reassignment

How to find a good fit between business and personnel growth:

  • Salary costs increase year by year.
  • It doesn't make sense to increase customer billing year by year.

Burnout counter: Engagement

I engage to work closely with development teams on several specific topics:

  • Designing databases with fine-tuned data types
  • Supporting the Product Manager in auditing the product preparation
  • Reviewing code

However, it's still important to dedicate time to strategic topics and prioritize tasks.

Get your hands dirty

One responsibility as an engineering lead is to support pre-sales by providing quick, rough estimations. Additionally, I need to understand how the product operates in the production environment. Therefore, I sometimes support product operation teams with configuration management. This takes time and requires practice. When I am doing many things in various contexts, I can easily become stressed.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

PSMDB - A MongoDB alternative for having Encryption At Rest

Encryption is the most popular tool for securing data both in transit and at rest. - For protecting data in transit, we can configure to use the TLS connection - For protecting data at rest, we can use Percona Server for MongoDB (PSMDB), an open-source alternative for MongoDB Enterprise. License PSMDB Docker images follow the SSPL license. Therefore, it is not a problem when I only have my containers deployed in on-premises environments. Running MongoDB Replication on OpenShift I have successfully installed the replication by following the guide Install Percona Server for MongoDB on OpenShift . In order to make it work properly with my needs, I disabled some features from the default deployment. See the detail in this change Basically, I needed to create a CRD (Custom Resource Definition) to let OpenShift/Kubernetes what PSMDB is. Then, I deployed the Operator pod. Finally, I deployed the PSMDB StatefulSet. I used NFS shares for Persistent Volumes. Create CRD for PSMDB 2 git clone http...

The HelloWorld example of JSF 2.2 with Myfaces

I just did by myself create a very simple app "HelloWorld" of JSF 2.2 with a concrete implementation Myfaces that we can use it later on for our further JSF trying out. I attached the source code link at the end part. Just follow these steps below: 1. Create a Maven project in Eclipse (Kepler) with a simple Java web application archetype "maven-archetype-webapp". Maven should be the best choice for managing the dependencies , so far. JSF is a web framework that is the reason why I chose the mentioned archetype for my example. 2. Import dependencies for JSF implementation - Myfaces (v2.2.10) into file pom.xml . The following code that is easy to find from  http://mvnrepository.com/  with key words "myfaces". <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId> <artifactId>myfaces-api</artifactId> <version>2.2.10</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core<...

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me  if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation -  Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin  to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do  is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"   - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...