DEV Community: Sarah Marion

How to quit your office job and find a remote-first software engineering role that suits you

Sarah Marion — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 16:42:02 +0000

Everyone keeps talking about software engineers quitting their jobs to work remotely (a16z, Homebrew, Axios, Bloomberg, people on Twitter). Less discussed is the work that goes into choosing a new company and role - it's a little more complex than ""quit in-person company, join the first remote-first company that offers me a job"".

We're open sourcing the decision matrix that we use at Commit. This guide will help you identify what specifically matters most to you (base salary, an open source culture, never having to manage or mentor more junior employees, getting to learn about data engineering, or maybe all of the above!), how much all of your identified attributes matter relative to each other, and how to score the companies and roles you're considering against them.

Career transitions are a rare opportunity to optimize your life around what's uniquely important to you. It's freeing, but it's also stressful - we hope this guide eases some of that stress.

Make a copy of this doc (File > Make a Copy) and get to work figuring your life out!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xUndXJGS296bXLWbegNZUmzcbGnuVwbNGkQSf8lKv3s/edit#gid=635502141

If you have any suggestions or questions about this template, email me at sarah.marion@commit.dev.

Testing AWS' Network Load Balancer on Commit’s open source Zero infrastructure

Sarah Marion — Wed, 12 May 2021 20:22:11 +0000

Commit's Chief Architect - formerly at Hootsuite - manages an open source project Zero (https://github.com/commitdev/zero). As part of regular maintenance, he was trying to make a switch to using Amazon Web Services’ Network Load Balancer from their “Classic” Elastic Load Balancer. NLB is billed as AWS’s next generation of load balancers. He was hoping for a better experience than he's had with ELB—although my experience with ELB has been mostly positive, as it tends to be fairly fast and stable. We’ve been using ELB with Kubernetes for quite some time, and he's fairly confident in how these technologies work together.

The goal was to be able to use Network Load Balancer stably as the load balancer on the edge of our infrastructure, sending traffic to an internal Elastic Kubernetes Service cluster running Nginx Ingress Controller. He wanted to be able to add and remove nodes, do a deploy rollout to the ingress controller without any disruption of traffic, and retain client IP information for logs and application functionality.

He found that in all three modes of operation—External Traffic Policy: Local, External Traffic Policy: Cluster, and NLB–IP—there were gotchas that would lead to traffic loss under not unrealistic conditions, such as nodes being added and removed and rollouts of the ingress controller. The ingress controller is a fairly stable piece of the setup and shouldn’t require many updates, restarts, etc., but he expects to be able to perform these operations when I need to, without any impact on users.

He wrote a piece about the planned transition, his blockers, and what he thinks stands in the way of broader adoption of Amazon Web Services’ Network Load Balancer.

https://blog.commit.dev/articles/testing-network-load-balancer-on-commits-open-source-zero-infrastructure

Learn which of the biggest developer tools companies align with your values

Sarah Marion — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:47:21 +0000

The average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime. Where people choose to spend those hours has a huge impact on the quality of their life.

We all have a unique set of values, which themselves aren't good or bad. What matters is the overlap between your values as an engineer and a startup's values - this will inform how happy you are at work.

At Commit, we spend all day, every day matching engineers and startups. Some factors are easy to match on - seniority, shared tech stacks, familiarity with particular projects and feature tasks. The hard part is understanding values alignment - a desire for autonomy vs for mentorship, an orientation towards solving hard technical problems vs messy customer problems, attention to detail in code quality, a bias for action, the belief that decisions are best made via vocal debate or through written communication with built-in documentation for posterity.

This is made all the more complex when you ask startups and engineers to tell you what they value in a work culture. You get messy, unstructured data in return - hundreds of responses, each using different terms, with no universal shared meaning.

We’ve built an internal map of this unstructured data. When a startup tells us that their culture mirrors a sports team, we know based on the specific questions we ask if they mean that they prioritize collaboration (no ego, it doesn’t matter who scores the goal), competitiveness (we play to win), or adaptability (everyone should be prepared to tap into another player’s role).

We're open sourcing this knowledge. We’ve taken the questionnaire that all of our new engineers complete at Commit, and turned it into a lightweight quiz that’s open for anyone to take. You’ll get a high-level summary of the values we think you hold. You’ll also learn which of the largest developer tools startups share those values.

If you're interested in getting a personalized list of companies that align with your values, feel free to try out the quiz - https://tally.so/r/nPRZP3! If you have feedback on the quiz, or questions about our methodology, feel free to reach out to sarah.marion@commit.dev!