Building Distributed Systems
in Distributed Teams
Sebastian Grodzicki @ DevOpsDays 2019
@sebgrodzicki
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Who is working from
home?
ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
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Who is working from a
coworking space?
ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
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Who is working from an
office?
ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
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Who can work from home for
1 day/week?
ȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱȱ
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$ whoami
Sebastian Grodzicki
• Engineering Manager at
• ex-CTO at SHOWROOM & GoldenLine
• #LifeAtElastic
@sebgrodzicki
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ELK Elastic Stack
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Cluster
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Stats
…
…
…
…
employees
countries
languages
time zones
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Stats
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Stats
+
1600
+
40
+
30
+
20
Elasticians
countries
languages
time zones
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27 offices
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DISTRIBUTED
by design
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Founders
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DISTRIBUTED
not remote
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Office
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Coworking space
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Home office
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Home office
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Home office
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Home office
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X-School
X-School
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Elastic Heart
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Elastic Heart
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Elastic Heart
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Engineering All Hands
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Global All Hands
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Volunteer Time Off
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Our Source Code
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Team
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Leaders
Team
Lead
Product
Lead
Tech
Lead
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Meetings
• weekly team planning meeting
• 1:1 with your manager
• team time (informal/off-topic)
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Bugpool,
Demo day,
Company All Hands, etc.
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Release train
Development QA
Release
Feature freeze
QA
Release
Feature freeze
QA
Release
Feature freeze
Development
Development
Development
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Semantic Versioning
7 4 2
.
.
major minor patch
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Downsides
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Downsides
• share the pain of timezones
• communication can fail
• cultures are different
• decisions can drag
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Tools
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Tools
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Tools
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Tools
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Tools
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Hiring
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Hiring
• Age, gender, location, race, … is just an attribute
• hard technical & soft professional skills
• 1,000+ CVs per week
• no bullshit
• max. 5 interviews
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Hiring
500 to 600: 5 months
600 to 700: 3 months
700 to 800: 2 months