A Day of Tech Guy

Our team tried hard to improve daily workflow in the past few years. We made every effort to dispatch different tasks to the right person in a proper time. When features were produced, we would enlist several involvers into a micro group, usually included frontend, backend, iOS dev, Android dev, QA, UE, PM, and etc, which we called it 开队, 打怪, 打Boss, Sprint.

Guys(老湿) who were not assigned even a task would set feet on Camp(湿地), where to accomplish trivial work like bugs fixing, business supports, and so on. Tech guy was one of them, but had a bit more jobs than other guys in the camp.

Let’s look at my life as a TECH GUY in daily work!

Merge Pull Request

We had used github enterprise edition to manage source for a long time, although migrated to a github-likable system code developed by guys I work with last month. But the workflow is still the same!

This is basic workflow:

• Make pull requests from feature branches to master
• Invite coding reviewers, usually via posting a review comment: @bke_team @f2e_team @somebody code review please..
• If reviewers have latency to do the coding review, tech guy has responsibility to notify involvers.
• Waiting for every reviewers posted a short phrase lgtm as a review comment (emoji :lgtm: is as well).
• Waiting for CI suite passed.
• Tech guy click the green Merge the pull request button.

In general, tech guy’s work is to click button.

This mechanism is designed to help keeping both the quality of source code and the efficiency of process. Tech guy only needs to judge whether the pull requests have met the requirements of merging.

As we all know, coding review is the shield to make code clean. In some teams, merge will be executed by a high level developer who has both authority to decide and to merge, which makes me feel he is more like a tyrant. In some teams, merge will be executed by guys who makes pull request himself, which makes routine in chaos and put codebase into an unmaintainable situation. It’s necessary to split coding review and merging into 2 routines.

I develop a dashboard to help tech guy watching the progress for going pull requests, which make this work much more easily. Here is a screenshot:

A tech guy can get all informations he wanted to merge at a glance. The basic information include requester, issue id, title, TO-DOs, reviewers, their conclusions, CI result, coverage report.

If one reviewer says lgtm, his avatar would rounded by green border, otherwise a red border. If there is no reviewer, then the item will be rendered over yellow background, which means that it’s time for tech guy to notify involvers. If all reviewers says lgtm and ci is passed, the item will be rendered over green background.

Usually, tech guy needs going to issue page and clicking the merge button whenever he sees the green item at last.

It’s really simple for him: find green item, merge it.

Although as a hub of this mechanism, he won’t be the SPOF problem. We can alternate tech guy easily by transfer authority to another guy in the camp through one setting option in the code system. Typically, we change tech guy every week. And we use a trello card to manage weekly routine:

Fireman

Usually it’s QA to trigger deploy event through fabric command. But tech guy is often do that so. Although every member have authority to deploy :)

Tech guy have another job: watch graphite stats. This is an example screenshot:

A tech guy can see several extremely important indicators:

• response time
• 40x occurrence
• 50x occurrence
• some service stats

It’s built on to top of library cubism, which is a wrapper of d3.js. If the system is getting worse, tech guy who is concerning about graphic will quickly notice the dark green color and then make proper actions.

Usually, the errors will happen after a deployment. Tech guy need to help decide how to handle it, rollback or hot fix.

Assign Bugs

We use sentry as a realtime error logging and aggregation platform, trello as a collaboration tool to organize our projects. I also integrate trello and sentry into one dashboard for tech guy. In the dashboard, tech guy can easily report bugs to transform a sentry web page into a trello card, marking it red flag! Now he knows who is tracing the related bug.

Origin Sentry Group

Transform to Trello Card

Dashboard

Trivial Work

Same as other guys in the camp.

Conclusions

Tech guy is an important role to help other developers focus on their projects and keeping collaboration more easily. It’s kinda hoping that you like this mechanism.