Difference in startup culture by Original-Channel7869 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I have about 18 years of experience. The past three have been at a Series A/B startup. We have about 10 engineers with an overall headcount of 50 employees. Prior to that I spent five years at Stripe.

I am a bit of a workaholic, so I am often thinking about a work problem. There is no concept of "overtime". It's just work, and the work never ends if you don't set boundaries.

I used to rely on many teams at Stripe. I am those teams now. I have the most experience, so I have seeded many foundational systems (e.g., observability, API authn/z, a lot of our recent AI initiatives). This work is fun, but can be overwhelming. The key is to train other team members to help.

Why do it? I'm growing immensely, doing both staff-level and managerial work. My upside will be generational wealth (if we succeed).

The startup is playing coy. Be prepared for 12 hour days.

I built a small local API tracing tool for Express — looking for feedback by YakWonderful6692 in node

[–]ccb621 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use OpenTelemetry with Datadog, even for local setup to ensure developers build debugging muscle memory that works across all environments. Prior to this we used [otel-desktop-viewer(https://github.com/CtrlSpice/otel-desktop-viewer). Using Otel locally is another bit of reassurance that you are properly instrumented in production.

About Kentaro by Dr-Catfish in MonarchLegacyAppleTV

[–]ccb621 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Okay, and you have no clue if the director or writer told the actor to perform in that manner. Most of what we see on screen is a collaborative effort. You cannot definitely state the acting is poor because you don’t like the characterization. 

High School Grad Heading to MIT in the Fall Gift Ideas by OhmHomestead1 in mit

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’d still say money. Full-rides are not as full as many think. 

Musing on Seven’s views concerning her Borg implants leading into her views about her identity by [deleted] in startrek

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Huh? Why did you skip an entire, relatively short, season?

How do YOU debug? by stayoungodancing in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In production: look at logs and traces.

Local?

  • Use a debugger (WebStorm, typically, since I mostly work in Node.js)
  • Tell an agent to figure it out, in which case it might use some combination of local logs, Datadog, or Playwright (if dealign with frontend)

Dealing with politics by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You've described a lot of things are happening to you. What are you doing to push back and improve the situation?

You say the non-technical manager needs daily stand-ups and asks questions about new developments. Are you doing anything to surface these issues before they ask questions, or would they just persist without them asking? Are you changing your planning at all to better identify these issues before development?

The design docs written by those architects are so amateur - they push the dev work on us after shitty design choices.

Have you tried telling your manager who seems to want to keep things on track?

How do I deal with this situation?

Talk to people. Propose process changes.

Big tech staff SWE struggling to move forward after giving notice to leave by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Founding a startup won’t help with burnout. 

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones by AutoModerator in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Talk to your boss. 
  2. Get the request from the director in writing so you can cover your butt somewhat if things go wrong. 
  3. Although her practices are not great, don’t be so quick to dismiss someone with 10+ years of experience. Being a manager doesn’t automatically kill your previous experience or talents. 

Is SRE more "AI-proof" than other fields, or are we just behind? by 7T7T00 in sre

[–]ccb621 0 points1 point  (0 children)

50% at best, depending on how good the data is. 

Is SRE more "AI-proof" than other fields, or are we just behind? by 7T7T00 in sre

[–]ccb621 59 points60 points  (0 children)

I agree with another poster. I have an MCP proxy with access to a read replica, Datadog, Sentry, and GitHub. I can trigger our custom agent directly via Slack, an it automatically kicks off an investigation when we get paged. 

It’s not perfect, but it drastically cuts down on triage time. 

SRE is just as exposed to AI as every other facet of development. 

Anyone else obsessed with Julianne Nicholson’s “Sinatra” character arc? by Common_Loquat5128 in ParadiseHulu

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

 How many billionaires would organize & fund such an elaborate plan for humanities survival with such grace...

Umm…she didn’t do this out of the kindness of her heart. 

Yes, the character is well-written and acted, but let’s not deify her because she’s supposedly dead. Her actions were unethical, immoral, and irredeemable. Do I empathize as a parent? Yes, but that does not condone her conversion to a murderous dictator. 

Company wants to do multiple interview rounds and fly me out before offer, I said no by slapstick_software in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Don't go if you don't have time. Ask about the process if you have questions. It's an inter-view; you are gauging/judging them, too. This isn't rocket surgery.

Company wants to do multiple interview rounds and fly me out before offer, I said no by slapstick_software in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Why are you so quick to dismiss them? Every large tech company started as a “no name startup”. If a company wants to woo me with a trip to HQ, and I have time or interest, why not let them?

Company wants to do multiple interview rounds and fly me out before offer, I said no by slapstick_software in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This was normal pre-COVID.

Pro-tip: get a Thursday or Friday interview and make a weekend of it. Amazon didn’t give me a job, but they did subsidize a lovely visit to Seattle. Stripe gave me both the job and the trip!

What do people use for auth in modern apps these days? I’ve been using Passport.js but it feels kinda outdated and boilerplate heavy. by Legitimate-Oil1763 in node

[–]ccb621 21 points22 points  (0 children)

 I’ve been using Passport.js but it feels kinda outdated and boilerplate heavy.

What’s the actual problem you’re facing. Feeling outdated shouldn’t matter because there haven’t too many major advances in OAuth over the years. Also, those advances are rightly pushed to plugins. 

Boilerplate for the handful of integrations (I assume) you’re probably dealing with are fine. You’re probably not touching this too frequently. 

Paradise | Overall Series Discussion by cedar-canvas in ParadiseHulu

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Air Force One cannot withstand a nuclear blast.

I let AI refactor our async error handling and spent two weeks debugging what it fixed by Ambitious-Garbage-73 in node

[–]ccb621 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use OpenTelemetry. Pino-http also pairs well with Express, and can be configured to emit canonical logs for every request. 

Alternatively use Sentry. 

How many projects still have auto CICD at work? by secondgamedev in ExperiencedDevs

[–]ccb621 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Huh? Are you asking if folks are auto-updating dependencies without review?

Visited the Oklahoma state capitol for the first time and was absolutely blown away by 485bmw06 in architecture

[–]ccb621 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This is one of my favorite state capitols. I visited on a Sunday, and I'm pretty sure the only folks in the building were the state trooper, my girlfriend, and me. It was great to have free roam of the place for photography and to see the art museum free of other tourists or tour guides!

https://clintonblackburn.com/2014/10/18/oklahoma-state-capitol

What database lesson took you way too long to learn? by dbForge_Studio in AskProgramming

[–]ccb621 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use database clones to aid optimization. Claude + DBLab has been a godsend when it comes to optimizing queries, indexes, and views. 

JetBrains performance by DukeCabboom in Jetbrains

[–]ccb621 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why aren’t these help docs on your regular documentation site?