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Code Capsule Posts

Launching Sidenote 🚀

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on December 8, 2020

If there’s one lesson that 2020 has taught me, it’s the value of focusing on opportunities rather than lamenting myself on what is not possible or what was taken away. I took advantage of the quarantine to go back to coding on a regular basis during my free time, and in the process I learned about TypeScript, Node.js, and MongoDB.

When I took a more managerial path early 2016, my focus naturally switched towards organizational topics. I must admit it did feel that my tech chops were slowly getting rusty, and I knew I had to do something about it. So when the first quarantine started, I set a simple goal for myself: to code for at least three hours per week. I actually tracked the time I spent on it to hold myself accountable, and I did hold onto it.

Today, after more than one hundred hours of coding and learning spent between April and November 2020, I am super proud to announce that I am launching an MVP for Sidenote.me, a web app to take timestamped notes on videos. If you’re reading this post until here, it would mean the world to me if you gave it a try just for a minute and then posted your feedback in the comments section below. And if you like it, talk about it on your favorite social media.

By the way, I’m going to be posting on this tech blog again very soon, about engineering and leadership topics. Subscribe to my newsletter below for fresh articles.

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Continue reading…Launching Sidenote 🚀

Service Ownership Checklist

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on November 12, 2017

Building and maintaining infrastructure services requires to strive for quality and ownership. But it’s not always easy to know what we are missing, and what assumption we are making that we don’t know of. To help myself and my colleagues reason about whether we are addressing the important topics, I came up with something I call the Service Ownership Checklist. It’s still in a draft format, but I’ve already refined it thanks to the help and feedback of many of my peers around me, and I’m now releasing it on my blog hoping that it can help other infrastructure engineers as well.

The way to use this document is to share it with your colleagues and teams, and have them ask each other some of the questions to see how they’re doing on all these topics and challenge their assumptions. You will hopefully uncover unknown issues, and create enough urgency to go and fix them.

This blog post is organized in two parts. The first part is the Service Ownership Checklist, a set of loose questions that can be used in brainstorming and sharing sessions, and the second part is a condensed version in the form of a questionnaire, the Service Ownership Questionnaire, which shows the different levels of quality for each reliability topic.

The SRE organization at Google is running Launch Reviews when they release new services, and for this they use a Launch Review Checklist. I recommend that you read Chapter 27 of the Google SRE book, which covers the subject.

Finally, if you think of any other topics, or of a better way to group the questions into categories, please post a comment below! And if you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the mailing list at the top of this page, and you will receive an update every time a new article is posted.

Continue reading…Service Ownership Checklist
Planned Reading: The Trick for Reading Nonfiction
Autonomous Peer Learning at Booking.com and How You Can Do it in Your Organization

Autonomous Peer Learning at Booking.com and How You Can Do it in Your Organization

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on December 11, 2016

This article was originally published for Booking.com’s Technology blog on November 23rd, 2016.

Continuous learning on the job is hard. We all see things we want to improve, but maybe we’re missing a few skills to really make an impact. With most days filled with emails and meetings, there’s often not much time left for learning, no matter how much we want to develop our skills.

Although many organizations try to remedy this issue by employing external companies to handle training, they rarely follow-up to ensure such trainings are actually value for money. Not only that, employees are often left to figure out how their new skills can be applied to daily work, and sometimes they are even left wondering if the training taught them anything useful at all.

I work at Booking.com as an engineering manager, and in my job I wanted to learn about a topic for which there was no formal training. I ended up creating a study group that became the blueprint for autonomous peer learning in our Technology department. It’s an initiative that has been scaled to 50 Peer-to-Peer (or P2P) learning groups over the last 18 months.

The premise of P2P groups is that participants take the time to think about what they want to learn and why. This means their learning is tailored from the very beginning, ensuring that it is both relevant to their work and beneficial to their organization.

Continue reading…Autonomous Peer Learning at Booking.com and How You Can Do it in Your Organization
Optimize your monitoring for decision-making

Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 10: High-Performance Networking: KingServer vs. Nginx

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 21, 2016

This is Part 10 of the IKVS series, “Implementing a Key-Value Store”. You can also check the Table of Contents for other parts. In this series of articles, I describe the research and process through which I am implementing a key-value database, which I have named “KingDB”. The source code is available at http://kingdb.org. Please note that you do not need to read the previous parts to be able to follow what is going on here. The previous parts were mostly exploratory, and starting with Part 8 is perfectly fine.

In this article, I explain the model and inner workings of KingServer, the network server for KingDB. In order to put things into perspective I also cover Nginx, the high-performance HTTP server well-known for its network stack, and how it differs from KingDB.

Continue reading…Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 10: High-Performance Networking: KingServer vs. Nginx
How to get started with infrastructure and distributed systems

How to get started with infrastructure and distributed systems

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on January 3, 2016

Most of us developers have had experience with web or native applications that run on a single computer, but things are a lot different when you need to build a distributed system to synchronize dozens, sometimes hundreds of computers to work together. I recently received an email from someone asking…

Continue reading…How to get started with infrastructure and distributed systems

Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 9: Data Format and Memory Management in KingDB

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on August 3, 2015

This is Part 9 of the IKVS series, “Implementing a Key-Value Store”. You can also check the Table of Contents for other parts. In this series of articles, I describe the research and process through which I am implementing a key-value database, which I have named “KingDB”. The source code is available at http://kingdb.org. Please note that you do not need to read the previous parts to be able to follow. The previous parts were mostly exploratory, and starting with Part 8 is perfectly fine.

In this article, I explain how the storage engine of KingDB works, including details about the data format. I also cover how memory management is done through the use of a compaction process.

Continue reading…Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 9: Data Format and Memory Management in KingDB

Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 8: Architecture of KingDB

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on May 25, 2015

This is Part 8 of the IKVS series, “Implementing a Key-Value Store”. You can also check the Table of Contents for other parts. In this series of articles, I describe the research and process through which I am implementing a key-value database, which I have named “KingDB”. The source code is available at http://kingdb.org. Please note that you do not need to read the previous parts to be able to follow. The previous parts were mostly exploratory, and starting with Part 8 is perfectly fine.

In the previous articles, I have laid out the research and discussion around what needs to be considered when implementing a new key-value store. In this article, I will present the architecture of KingDB, the key-value store of this article series that I have finally finished implementing.

Continue reading…Implementing a Key-Value Store – Part 8: Architecture of KingDB