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‹#› Michael Basnight Suyog Rao From 50-250: Scaling a distributed engineering team

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Who are we?

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Who are we? Kibana Elasticsearch Beats Logstash Security Alerting Monitoring Reporting X-Pack Graph Elastic Cloud

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Who are we?

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Who are we? 485 elasticians

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Who are we? 485 elasticians 32 countries

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Who are we? 485 elasticians 250 engineers 32 countries

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Who are we? 485 elasticians 250 engineers 32 countries 50+ million downloads

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5 At the beginning

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The founders: 2012 Shay Uri Simon Steven

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Next few hires:

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Next few hires:CFO ??

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7 Distributed By Design

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‹#› A distributed system is a software system in which components located on network computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages

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Elasticsearch the software, was distributed from day 1

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What does a distributed software and distributed, open source company have in common?

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Lots

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‹#› Distributed systems: communication 12

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Asynchronous Comms

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Email: Filters included Timezone friendly

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Email: Filters included How we reached a decision

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Email transparency

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16 Some email become history

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17 Reply-all is fun!

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18 Emails become t-shirts

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GitHub all the things

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20 @mention someone directly on GH issue instead of discussing in Slack

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‹#›

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Synchronous Comms

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23 Join any room Technical discussions in public Public communication will educate everyone

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24

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25 Meetings

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25 Dev Standups 25 Meetings

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25 25 Dev Standups Collapses 25 Meetings

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25 25 50 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses 25 Meetings

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25 25 Table Group 50 70 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses 25 Meetings

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25 25 Table Group 50 70 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings

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25 25 Table Group Black Belt Session 50 70 140 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings

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25 25 Table Group Black Belt Session Cross Product/
 Per Product Sync 50 70 140 200 Demo Day Dev Standups Collapses Collapses 70 25 Meetings

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26 Meetings are open: dev cal

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27 Persistent zoom session Always On Zoom: hop on, hop off

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Zoom release party

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Engineering all-hands: 2x a year

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Engineering all-hands: 2x a year Vision, long term plans Talks from CEO and investors 2 days team time 1 day cross product

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Engineering all-hands:meetings with a view!

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Engineering all-hands: fun day!

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33 dev process Agile, Waterfall

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34 Consensus based

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‹#› GitHub to track things

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36 Pull Requests: Peer Review

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37 LGTMs == ACKs

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Releases

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39 Before: Independent releases

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Time based releases

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41 Release Process: Time based x.y.z —> major.minor.patches

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Release: Train analogy

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Release Process: Time based Merge when ready and scalable Otherwise catch the next train Important: No pressure on devs for pushing features

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44 Team dynamic

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No content

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How’s the org structure Flat org Self organising teams Highly available

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47

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Hire the best talent from anywhere Globally distributed

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A node has many roles

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Engineers are nodes

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Engineers are evangelists

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Engineers write blogs

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Engineers do support

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Engineers write documentation

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Engineers have autonomy

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51 node discovery node looking for other nodes in elastic

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52

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Hiring “how many golf balls fit in an airplane ?”

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Hiring “how many golf balls fit in an airplane ?”

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Hiring No puzzle questions Each team has different interview styles Technical and team fit for distributed environment

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Nodes are independent

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56 0 10 20 30 40 50 0-3 3-6 9-12 12-15 15-18 18+ Average experience

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On Boarding: Mentoring Day 1 High touch mentoring Mentor != Manager

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On Boarding: x-school Week-long orientation in Mountain View, CA Meet team leads, product team Big Picture: Understand business functions

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59 Takeaways

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Key takeaways Don’t manage by outliers

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Key takeaways Progress over perfection

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In closing… They say it won’t work at 50, 100, 500..

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Questions?

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More resources https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/conf/2016/sf/inside-elastic-engineering https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/conf/2017/sf/on-distributed-systems-and-distributed-teams https://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works/ Fonts and slide design were inspired by Zach Holman: https://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/