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A Template for Software Engineering Standards

Software engineering standard template A well-structured standard acts as a blueprint that guides engineers in their daily tasks and long-term goals. Below, I will outline a template for creating a comprehensive software engineering standard. Header The header serves as the document's identifier. It contains the following: Authors : The people who have contributed to the creation of the standard. Created Date : The date when the document was initially created. Version : The version of the standard. It is typically updated with significant changes. Status : The current status of the document, whether it's in draft, in-review, or official. Next Review Date : The date when the standard will be reviewed for relevancy and accuracy. Table of Contents A table of contents provides an overview of what the document contains, making it easier for readers to navigate through the document. Body The body of the standard comprises: Values : The core beliefs that guide the decision-maki...

Improving the execution time of CI pipelines

Executing a large number of tests, especially integration tests, takes a lot of time. For instance, the pipeline of one of our projects for each Pull Request previously took nearly 30 minutes, including over 1 thousand test cases. This article guides you through several good techniques that we have discovered and applied to improve the time-consuming process. Parallel stages Analyze the current phases in your pipeline and categorize them in parallel. For example, we can separate the build and verify code of Node.js and Maven modules simultaneously in our Jenkins pipelines. Please mind using the setting failFast whether you want to abort the pipeline immediately. Read more: Parallel stages with Declarative Pipeline 1.2 (jenkins.io) Parallel test execution If you use Maven, t he plugin maven-failsafe-plugin is used to execute integration tests during phases integration-test and verify  the build lifecycle. It allows us to execute tests in parallel. There are many settings related ...

A theme for productivity at work

Simplifying the To-Do List I have started to simplify how I manage tasks by using journaling as my tool. It's just one page, and all I need to do is write down what I need to do each day. This page will be archived weekly, and no personal kanban is needed anymore. I feel that this approach is sufficient for the job. Focus Mode I rarely get any notifications during the week. - I use macOS Focus Mode "Mindfulness" as my default. - I uninstall desktop apps that make noise, such as Slack, Outlook, Teams, and Messenger. Instead, I use the web in my browser. - I use Flow as my Pomodoro app. - I use macOS Shortcuts to define most of the tasks I do at work. Keeping in Mind... When I was too engaged in work, it was easy to get exhausted. There are two things that I should always keep in mind to avoid burnout: - Always save time for adapting to changes. - Do not expect too much from outsiders.

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 close...

Think like a Engineering Manager

Off-boarding Members can leave the company for various reasons, and as a manager, it is important to take action. Hoping for the best is not a strategy. In the case of a low-performing member, I can kindly issue an official warning, set clear objectives for improvement, and re-evaluate the results. If there is a conflict between members, I need to be mindful and go beyond the situation to list our expectations with corresponding actions. Finally, if a member has a big chance to grow at another company, I can have an honest discussion with that member about the trade-offs. Balance at Work As an engineering manager, it is important to balance involvement in meetings and getting your hands dirty on some topics. The goal is to become a companion to teams. Here are my two actions to deal with the situation: Dedicate time for important-but-not-urgent tasks and prioritize them daily. Categorize work into four lines including management, project support, OKRs, and self-study. Management Conduc...

Books Read in 2022

My bookshelf Technical - Operating System: Three Easy Pieces. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. - The Effective Engineer. Edmond Lau. - English Grammar in Use. Raymond Murphy - Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering. Brooks Jr., Frederick P.  - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd edition). Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister. - A Philosophy of Software Design. John Ousterhout. - Modern Computer Architecture and Organization: Learn x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures and the design of smartphones, PCs, and cloud servers. Jim Ledin. Thought Provoking - Đúng Việc. Giản Tư Trung. - A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking. - Một đời như kẻ tìm đường. Phan Văn Trường. - Một đời thương thuyết. Phan Văn Trường. - Tinh hoa xử thế - Dám bị ghét. Kishimi Ichiro, Koga Fumitake. - Phép màu để vượt lên chính mình. Nhan Húc Quân. - Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship Through Woodcraft. Robert Baden-Powell. - Thay Đổi Cuộc Sống Với Nhân ...

My 2022 Review

2022 was completely a mind-blowing year for me. Lots of changes happened at work. At present, things seem to be going to settle down, I want to look back at my year. My balcony (2022) Q1 At beginning of the year, I started with Metaverse and NFT research. I completed my first course about a new technology Blockchain on brilliant[dot]com which became my best favorite learning platform later on. Getting a certified IBM developer certification was also a good experience. I gained more knowledge of technologies including containerization, microservices, DevOps, and Cloud-Native. It triggered me to plan for DevOps toolchain enhancement for the company. Adopting GitOps practice was a good start. It is one of my main focuses for my position role as a Tech Lead. I was really impressed by the book “The Brief History of Time”. The story of Stephen Hawking was so inspiring. To me, it was one of my favorite books of this year. Sadly, this period was the time when some of my good friends were leavi...

Journal: This Month I Learned (2022-Nov)

This Month I Learned posts are aimed to share what I have learned during the month such as my thoughts, recommend resources, tips, how-to, and so on. Vung Tau beach Engineering Levels I conducted a lot of meetings with HRM to define the standards for evaluation criteria, career path ladder, Personal Appraisal (PA) processes, and onboarding/offboarding processes. I knew more about the expectation from an HRM perspective for engineering levels evaluation criteria. For example Define many enough titles for a long career path development Define general criteria for each level How to calculate score when evaluation with weight matrix applied Anticipate risks before executing a process Team Engineering Lead Organization I collected ideas from different people When having no dedicated leader, every member of the team has a fairly chance to practice leadership skills Scalability strategy: development teams’ size, and new position nomination. Security Awareness Training I conducted this sharing...

Projects Ownership

Developers should be informed transparently about the next things that they are going to do since it impacts their mentality as well as their accountabilities. A view of Vung Tau beach First thing first, the Product Owner plays a very important role in understanding the business of the projects clearly and planning the User Stories for Development Teams. For Development Teams, we have two roles related to a project including Owner and Maintainer. The following are the definition and responsibilities for each role: Project Owner The Owner is normally assigned to the team that created the project at the beginning. It is known as the long-term project of the team. Therefore, the members of the Owner have almost knowledge of the projects including the history (i.e decisions made), business logic, and technologies used.  - Maintain a good system design (code) of the projects. Therefore, they are mandatory to review code (pull requests) from other teams. - Maintain the related documents ...

Awareness of Product Development

Software development can be understood simply as a program to receive inputs (i.e customer needs) and then produce outputs (i.e working software). It is worth it to know how many steps are in that program. When something gets stuck in a step, everyone is aware of that. The first painting of my son The General Process Big Picture There are two main factors in this picture including the people with roles and their interactions. All people involved in developing the product know their responsibilities clearly and how to make things done right. Therefore, a good collaboration can be reached. Product Roadmap Contribution It would be great for developers to know what the next features to work on are as well as when those features will be delivered. Therefore, the product roadmap is very important. The items in the roadmap should be contributed by ALL people involved in the product. Because software engineers directly develop, test, delivery, and monitor the software, they should also contrib...

Automating deployment and managing apps on OpenShift

Previously, we maintained OpenShift templates for deploying apps in development environments as well as delivering these templates to our customers for their on-prem deployment. Customers who refer to our templates (as well as documentation) have their own configuration management tools to automate the deployment such as ArgoCD and FluxCD. My son's buildings Our developers usually modify templates (YAML) directly on OpenShift for testing and then adjust the corresponding templates stored in the Git repository in Bitbucket. This sometimes causes an issue that delivered templates are incorrect because: - Developers forget to update the templates in Git repositories. - Developers don’t test the templates Therefore, our goal was to integrate a tool into our CI/CD that can automate and manage the configuration of OpenShift apps. The delivered templates should be the ones that are able to run on our OpenShift with the following purposes: - Automate deployment from templated in Git repos...

DevOps Toolchain Enhancement

 Historically, our company ubitec had started with a customer project. Agile/Scrum was our proposal for working with customers. Time by time, Agile/Scrum also became our culture for software development. To be successful with this development approach, we somehow needed to have a fast release for customers (i.e. every one week). Back then, we had a build tool Jenkins which was responsible for having sprint release packages for our customers. The build job pipelines contain some steps such as gathering the artifacts, checking the code convention, running the tests, building docker images, and packaging an archived file (a zip file). The set of tools involved in a pipeline is roughly called a toolchain. It is just a part of a bigger process called the DevOps toolchain. Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-archive/2016/11/devops-architecture-available-on-bluemix-garage-method-site/ DevOps is a proven method that fits Agile. Today,  it is even treated as a mandatory factor...

Looking back on my 2021

As of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic still persists. In Vietnam, people have just passed a horrible time of lockdown, we needed to stay at home for nearly 4 months. I have even got covid infected and spent a quarantine time for more than three weeks. My balcony garden More books read This year, I read 22 books of various kinds. Reading books becomes my habit. English books Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't The Tao of Microservices Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 2 Vietnamese books Nhân tố Enzyme  Nếu biết trăm năm là hữu hạn Đạo giáo Tâm Thành và Lộc Đời Lịch sử tư tưởng Nhật Bản Totto-chan bên cửa sổ Thiền sư và em bé 5 tuổi Swiss Made Suối Nguồn Hạnh Phúc và May Mắn Một đời quản trị Con chó nhỏ mang giỏi hoa hồng Cách nuôi dạy những đứa trẻ dễ cáu giận, khó bảo Muôn kiếp nhân...

Safari (older than 14.1.1) rejects TLS connections of TURN with Let's Encrypt certificates

Summary We could not make a video call successfully on Safari older than 14.1.1. The call kept disconnecting for some seconds. We got the following error in Nginx’s log SSL: error:14094418:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert unknown ca:SSL alert number 48   Root cause The Safari didn’t trust our TLS certificates (certified by Let’s Encrypt) when establishing a TLS connection into our TURN server. It is a known issue that could be found at Bug 219274 - ICE does not resolve for `turns` relay candidates rooted in LetsEncrypt CA . The issue was just recently fixed (end of 2020), therefore old versions of Safari still meet the issues.   Solution In our development environment, we replaced the untrusted certificate with a trusted one. We will warn our customers about this issue in our installation guide. Technical explained WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all iOS web browsers. The WebRTC of WebKit relied on ...

There is no expert, there is only us

Chairs in my office Once I was chatting with my teammates... Me : "I wonder why it is always necessary to refer to this source, that source, has anyone done it, is there any research? While no problem is the same, no situation is the same. Why not use our own brains to create a whole new one? Why do we have to be the insiders to consult the outsiders? Isn't that very paradoxical?" My teammate : "I agree with your point that no two situations will be exactly the same and that there is no one size fits all. But there's one like this, I don't think it's all the problems we're dealing with that only we can meet. So of course, if I can find a source to refer to first, it's still better. Just like when implementing a software feature, not every problem is the same. But I still have to go check to see if I'm the only one I've met? Or if someone has met me, I have to see if their method suits me before I decide to try it, but I don't blindly ...

Quiz Marker - Chấm điểm AI (Beta) Available Now!

My Fansipanio Team has just launched our first product #QuizMarker, an efficient AI assistant for Vietnamese school teachers to mark their students' quizzes today. Visit Quiz Maker - Chấm điểm AI: Trợ lý chấm thi trắc nghiệm đắc lực của giáo viên for the detail.

Debugging the issue of using NFS shares for PSMDB on OpenShift

I have recently been trying to use PSMDB (Percona Server for MongoDB) as an open-source and free alternative for MongoDB Enterprise Server. I encountered an issue that the pod could not be initialized successfully with Persistent Volumes using NFS shares. I got the logs from the failed pod as follow: ------ ++ id -u ++ id -g + install -o 1000730000 -g 0 -m 0755 -D /ps-entry.sh /data/db/ps-entry.sh install: cannot change ownership of '/data/db/ps-entry.sh': Operation not permitted ---- I would like to share the steps how I used for debugging. The PSMD StatefulSet was deployed onto my OpenShift 3 OKD. Check the container mount info Go to a pod I could see the mount info as below mongod-data → /data/db read-write - mongod-data: Persistent volume claim name - /data/db: container mounted directory Check Persistent volume binding Go to the storage, I could know which persistent volume was bound to the corresponding persistent volume claim. Bound to volume psmdb-mongodb-data-0 Check P...