DEV Community: Jennifer Hooper

Moving fast, it’s more than breaking things

Jennifer Hooper — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 01:40:41 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the saying “move fast and break things” lately. First, Armory’s CEO, DROdio, did a tech talk with Launch Darkly, Pulumi, and SD Times: Move Fast & DON’T Break Things: Modernize Your SDLC without Compromising Customer Trust. The talk really resonated with me for a number of reasons:

It really did a great job of spelling out the importance of getting code out - and the cost for not doing so. Equating code to inventory and having to watch to ensure that it doesn’t go stale, was a really great way to frame this. It’s always a challenge to balance the tech debt with the new things. Who wants to work on redoing something you’ve already done when you can be working on something new and exciting?
It highlighted why you have to move - it is not an option not to. Think of all of your inventory rotting and going bad. You can’t continue to build or rely on a base that is not strong enough to support what you are doing.
And most of all, it highlights the thinking and challenges that companies that are enabling businesses to move fast are looking at and addressing.

On the other hand, I’ve been listening to the podcast as well as reading the book from Software Daily’s Jeff Meyerson on how Facebook builds software. This had a lot of similarities and also a lot of ideas in it that illustrated how Facebook has been so successful as an engineering organization.

I was at Heroku for four years and one of the things that really inspired me more than anything, is what Heroku customers were able to do with Heroku - and how quickly. When the pandemic hit, I witnessed story after story - and even helped tell a few of them - on how companies pivoted, how people created apps/solutions to help their neighborhoods or others in need, and the list goes on.

The number of disruptive businesses that were able to join the market with great success, as they were born in the cloud, just keeps growing.

I watch all of this and part of me laments for the “mom and pop” stores and a simpler time, but the larger part of me is constantly amazed by the great minds and innovation that are touching all of us in so many industries and so many different ways.

So, why does move fast resonate with me so much? Yes, it’s all of the above, but even more than that, I have come to realize that I am happiest and at home in environments and cultures that do move fast, that aren’t afraid to try new things, but ones that are ensuring that none of it is at the expense of the customer.

I’ve always love this quote from Mark Twain:

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Sometimes you do have to start with the long letter - or the mvp. But when things matter, moving fast doesn’t have to mean that the short letter can’t be written or shouldn’t be written... all good things take the right amount of time. The world moves fast, and I have to say that I am quite happy to be moving as fast as I can to stay on the ride.

via GIPHY

The luck of the covid draw from a long hauler

Jennifer Hooper — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 03:04:38 +0000

Luck is a funny thing. Sometimes you have it. Sometimes you don't. And even sometimes when you don't have you are still luckier than others. Isn't that still luck?

It is March. One year since the quarantine started. I remember how excited I was for my yearly Spring Training trip to Arizona when everything shut down. If I was traveling one week earlier, I would have made it. My brother did and posted some great happy pics with his friends. I love that for him, but...

Move forward to June and I start to feel sick. I knew it couldn't be covid since I hadn't been anywhere. Well, to the grocery store but that was with a mask, washing hands and all the things.

Still sick two weeks later, the doctor sent me for a covid test. I'd've lost a lot of money if anyone bet me on that as it was positive.

There starts:

three months of a fever
problems breathing
no energy - really no energy, I could barely get out of bed
pain - some severe - in all parts of my body
eye problems
head fog and memory challenges - how do you go from remembering most things to not remembering words or what someone just said? I never related more to "Squirrel!" in my life.

via GIPHY

And the list goes on and on, with multiple infections, cough, insomnia, losing my voice, and oh so much more. Never has the question "How are you feeling?" been so hard to answer? I have become a living game of whack-a-mole!

via GIPHY

Coming back to luck, even though I am still extremely limited and new symptoms keep appearing, I still feel luckier than many. Who else gets to go to a special doctors area where they dress as if I am a leper!

via GIPHY

I have my moments where I allow myself a little pity party but then I have to shake it off.

Covid doesn't define me. I am lucky I am here. I have more empathy and understanding for others who are suffering from things like memory loss. I will get better and I will just keep on this journey one step (or crawl, depending on the day) at a time.

Seeking 2021 Google Summer of Code Interns

Jennifer Hooper — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 01:54:13 +0000

Engineer With Armory, Sponsored by Google

Original post by Rosalind Benoit

Armory is proud to invest in Google Summer of Code again this year, and help foster a new generation of global engineering talent by mentoring students in CD Foundation projects. Passing along our understanding of enterprise-scale software delivery to new DevOps practitioners keeps us in touch with the Armory user’s journey : ) Want to participate in 2021, or know someone who might? Keep reading!

Innovation Through Mentoring

Last year’s crop of promising projects brought us Victor Odusanya’s implementation of a DroneCI pipeline stage in Spinnaker. With his project, Victor was able to expand open source support for continuous integration tools beyond Jenkins and Google Cloud Build. Now companies using DroneCI within pipelines can seamlessly extend Spinnaker to manage it, with Victor’s work to build from. This project also gave the Spinnaker community an early opportunity to handle a new extensibility request according to the lean-core commitment made by the TOC (Technical Oversight Committee); DroneCI integration happens via a plugin.

We’re currently still looking for bright new participants to join us in this year’s cohort! Please reach out to us in the Contributor Experience SIG channel on Spinnaker Slack ASAP to express interest or propose a project idea.

Paying It Forward: Spinnaker Plugins Workshop

The best part of investing in the future through GSoC has been seeing Victor pass his knowledge along to others and become part of the continuous delivery ecosystem. After completing GSoC, volunteering at Spinnaker Gardening Days, and participating in several plugin projects with Armory engineers, Victor was ready to teach an in-depth workshop at Spinnaker Summit in October:

Through community events, Victor networked with DevOps experts and gained experience integrating MS Teams, GitHub, Drone and other services with Spinnaker using the plugin framework. At the Summit, he focused on the case study of integrating Spinnaker with the GitHub Dispatch Endpoint, with the goal of triggering a GitHub Actions workflow. With the goal of lowering the barrier to entry for Spinnaker plugins, his workshop walks viewers through a plugin development experience with a sample GitHub Dispatches project. In the video above, watch him build models and methods into a working plugin, taking steps such as:

Consulting resources useful to Spinnaker plugin builders, such as the Plugin Creators Guide.
Starting the plugin project with prerequisites and Armory’s PF4J RandomWait Stage, a starter which contains bootstrap required for quick project setup.
Understanding how extensions to different Spinnaker services can be packaged together as submodules into a Gradle plugin bundle.
Managing Spinnaker service dependencies through Kork, and other dependency management tasks.
Extending Spinnaker’s Orca orchestration engine, which “connects the dots across the pipeline,” via the Orca API’s extension points.
Extending the PF4J plugin to configure logging for development.
Building a plugin class and entry point, to start the plugin and define setup actions.
Providing a stage definition to connect the new stage to other stages within pipelines; understanding Spinnaker stage definitions and associated methods.
Retrieving data, such as auth token and event type, from Spinnaker’s configuration manifest for use in a plugin.

Join Victor as he synthesizes everything he learned as a newcomer to Spinnaker Plugin development in 2020 into the workshop. If you are interested in working on your own GSoC project this year, you may decide to build an extension for Spinnaker using the same plugin framework. However, the sky is the limit, so bring your ideas, or get unblocked by reviewing our ideas on the GSoC page on Spinnaker.io. For architectural advice, help scoping your project, logistical answers, or moral support, reach out to Armory community organizers in the Spinnaker contributor experience channel to get connected with the mentor team.

As Victor explains in the workshop, developers can extend virtually any Spinnaker service. As a first step, determine if the interfaces you are looking to add functionality to have existing extension points. The friendly folks in the Platforms SIG can advise, or you can file an issue for recommendations on how a particular extension should be implemented. The wonder of GSoC, though, is that in addition to the usual channels for engaging with the Spinnaker community to innovate, you can also receive a stipend for Google for the summer, along with expert guidance from Armory engineers.

About Google Summer of Code

As a part of Google Summer of Code, student participants are paired with a mentor from the participating organizations, gaining exposure to real-world software development and techniques. Students have the opportunity to spend the break between their school semesters earning a stipend while working in areas related to their interests. In turn, we are able to identify and bring in new developers who implement new features and hopefully continue to contribute to open source even after the program is over. Most importantly, more code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Last year, Victor demonstrated to Armory that this project would indeed bring new faces and valuable perspectives to the project contributor table. Our friends in the Jenkins project have facilitated similar crossover from students to OSS visionaries in the past. Taking on a project is a fast track to becoming established in the CD Foundation’s practitioner community, and can help your tech career achieve lift off!

Next Steps For Applicants

Armory mentors have already been identified to work with YOU, or your favorite computing student, this summer! Visit the CD Foundations GSoC page for resources or next steps. Please reach out to us in the Contributor Experience SIG channel on Spinnaker Slack ASAP to express interest or propose a project idea, so we can help get you on your way.

The post Seeking 2021 Google Summer of Code Interns appeared first on Armory.

Impending Vroom — How Ruckit Will Modernize Construction Right in the Nick of Time

Jennifer Hooper — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 19:45:40 +0000

Alex Hendricks turns up the radio in the cabin of his ‘91 Ford LT8501. He’s drowning out the noise of the construction crew 100ft ahead as they make progress on a brand new bridge in Waco, Texas. Alex isn’t here to take in the sight of fresh new infrastructure. He’s in his truck waiting for the go-ahead to deliver a payload of hot mastic asphalt to the bridge crew.

Alex has a ticket in his hands that needs a sign-off from the project’s contractor — a signature that proves he made his delivery, and on time. Without it, he doesn’t get paid, and the clock is ticking. Each ticket earns him about $60, and missing any of today’s three deliveries will start to make him sweat. His wife, at home with their two-year-old, will start to worry. A technical issue stalls the bridge crew, and the hot asphalt sitting in the bed of Alex’s truck begins to harden.

If Alex's truck rests for too long, the asphalt will solidify, then the contractor will lose the materials, the asphalt company blamed, and the project delayed. Alex will have to fess up to his broker, Sascha Novarro, who texted him the night before to see if he could run the asphalt today, and since he needed the cash, to which he replied with an emphatic "Yes!".

Thankfully, Alex isn’t real. Sascha isn’t real, nor is the bridge project in Waco, nor the contractor about to lose his materials — but the situation they find themselves in occurs every day on thousands of construction sites across the United States.

Timing and coordination are paramount between contractors, foremen, material providers, brokers, and their truckers. These parties are often entirely independent of each other. They form a micro-gig economy that’s been around long before Uber was an idea, and they struggle to coordinate the daily logistics required to achieve their goals. The "endless" highway construction project you’re stuck commuting through daily is built on problems of fraud and inefficiency in the workflow, problems that software company Ruckit tackles every day.

As digital transformations revitalize labor-intensive processes across all industry sectors, opportunities such as trucking, those that pose "too big of a lift," go ignored — but not by Ruckit. In 2018, Ruckit launched a comprehensive platform targeting the construction industry, one of the nation’s un-techiest sectors. The lack of a digital ticketing system, of instant coordination between parties, of real-time logistics, and of fraud-prevention mechanisms all helped trucking become a 40% line-item on the budget for any given construction project.

This is the problem Ruckit solves every day, and they’re pretty much doing it solo.

Construction obstruction

The key challenge in bringing this century’s technical advancements to trucking has little to do with technology and everything to do with the guy in the driver’s seat.

Ruckit discovered that within a given horizontal construction project (bridge, road, highway, railroad, airfield, and similar), each requires the cooperation of approximately 16 unique, and often independent, personas. These range from the project manager to the back-office accountants to the contractor, foremen, broker, material provider, and of course, the trucker.

It was insufficient to digitize any one aspect of construction without digitizing the lot — one missing link in the chain forces all parties into a two-process system (blending the old with the new, and thereby multiplying the logistics). While Ruckit encountered few objections when prescribing their digital panacea to accountants and college-educated project managers, blue-collar truckers had one major hang-up: “What’s in it for me?”

Michael Bordelon, CTO of Ruckit, notes the company found success by satisfying the unique needs of every player along the construction pipeline. Scoping and bifurcating the product experience to enable each individual persona proved a critical decision. For the simple trucker trying to make ends meet, a full digital transformation proved a much tougher sell than most technologists would assume.

Paper tickets make perfect sense to truckers; they meant dollars and cents. These tickets are money they hold in the palms of their hands, not promises of cash from "the cloud." The cloud is hard to understand, and the paper in their hands, not so much.

Rather than fight an uphill battle, Ruckit knew the best way forward was to meet the market where it was. Without turning each trucker’s world into a series of zeroes and ones, Ruckit digitized their contributions and folded them into the bigger system without alienating them or talking down to them. They achieved this by releasing a mobile app that allows truckers to scan their paper tickets and take photos of their trucks on-site to verify deliveries. To entice the independent trucker to adopt the software, the app integrates the entire project pipeline (including backend accounting) to notify the trucker when their brokers submit an invoice for their tickets, when the invoice pays out, and when the trucker can expect money in their bank.

Beyond that, by integrating every animal along the construction food chain, truckers can receive and accept jobs from a single interface without going back-and-forth in phone calls and text messages.

And Ruckit achieved all of this without inventing anything new.

"We’re not inventing any new tech."

— Michael Bordelon, CTO, Ruckit

Building for the future

Michael admits, emphatically, that Ruckit did not set out to reinvent any tech wheels — all the parts needed to construct and provide their multi-tenant platform showed up turn-key and powerful right out of the box.

From custom mapping tools that help trucks avoid traffic violations and comply with city ordinances, to the AI-enabled OCR (optical character recognition) used to digitize photographs of paper tickets, Ruckit applies best practice and open source tooling to deliver immense value to this underserved market.

The Heroku platform makes it easy for Michael and his team to embed new technology into their Ruby on Rails and Django environments. For example, Ruckit applies machine learning to several layers of their application, one of which helps schedule deliveries to maximize efficiency and circumvent traffic flow — technology that came off the shelf now saves their customers tens of thousands of dollars per year. Cost savings compound when every player on the scene aligns on the Ruckit platform, which happens to be Ruckit’s vision for the future of construction. Over the next decade, Ruckit plans to inspire trust among truckers, a level of trust sufficient to convince them to switch to a purely digital ecosystem — "go paperless," if you will.

By receiving, delivering, and tracking all payloads digitally, Ruckit will have removed the last paper trail holdouts in the construction world. With a pure digital system, Ruckit expects a significant reduction in human error and in delays resulting from the digitization of paper tickets.

That’s their long game, and as of March 2020, the month which saw the dawn on a COVID-19 America, Ruckit is plowing full steam ahead.

Certainly uncertain

Michael approaches the near-term future with trepidation, yet also with optimism. He notes that in times of recession, as those we can expect in the coming years, the construction industry fairs better than most. It is in dire times such as these that governments unlock additional funds to improve infrastructure and push planned public works forward — as a consequence, they put millions of people to work on job sites.

While Ruckit may not be at the center of every project, Michael continues to field two sales calls per day to handle the immense interest in the Ruckit platform.

As our country, and the world at large, begin to recover from the personal and economical impacts of the COVID-19 virus, platforms such as Ruckit will be there to help coordinate the human effort which defines us as a civilized people: building.

“You can’t off-shore construction, and you can’t fake a bridge."

— Michael Bordelon, CTO, Ruckit

With that, Michael enlightens a long-held perspective on construction as an "unsexy" industry. In reality, whether we’re constructing the information superhighway or the regular kind, we’re still building. In either scenario, we come together as people to create beneficial structures for society. Without new and remodeled roads, highways, bridges, and beyond, the network of travel which modern life relies upon goes unmaintained. Without a system to organize the disparate efforts required, we shed efficiency and precious resources along the way.

Much like Ruckit helps construction projects focus on the deliverables, Heroku helps Ruckit focus on value.

Heroku as a utility

“When you open an office,” Michael reminds, “you don’t buy your own generator, pump it with gas, and plug in your desk lamp. You rely on the power grid. Same goes for our tech.” With Heroku, Ruckit is happy to do away with managing remote servers, load-balancing, uptime, and a host of DevOps tasks that otherwise require complete commitment from specialized employees.

“If there’s a usage spike, we spin up a couple more dynos, and that costs me an extra latte,” he smiles. With Heroku on the backend, Ruckit in the middle, and a host of construction professionals at the frontlines, together we offer a trickle-down efficiency that benefits all parties — it’s a win-win-win.

“I don’t want my team busy wasting resources on DevOps. I want them focused on delivering functionality and value to our end users. Heroku enables that, and I’m never going back.”

— Michael Bordelon, CTO, Ruckit

With Heroku powering Ruckit, and Ruckit powering more of the country’s construction efforts, we can expect a marvelous surge of efficiency and throughput from an industry that was long overdue for a high-tech makeover.