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Iteration is the goal

leadership management security

“Remind yourself the goal is iteration, even with engineering excellence.”

Have you ever worked at a place that:

  • Has a strong culture of code reviews and automated testing?
  • Builds everything with a CI/CD mindset?
  • Makes on-call a breeze with service health dashboards and alarms that point to runbooks?

One thing I’ve noticed recently is how easy it is to think:
“This is the standard, and we should do that everywhere.”

Having those “basics” down is essential for moving fast and quick iteration. The problem? Those basics take a lot of time to:

  • Set up
  • Train people to use
  • Train people to fix
  • Build a culture around

“Focus on Iteration” is one of our team tenets, and I’m sad that it’s taken me so long to fully accept that this applies to engineering excellence as well.

The CI/CD Journey: A Comedy in Several Acts

It’s really easy to start with a generic statement like:

I want CI/CD.

Then spend months finding all the use cases you need to cover:

Step 1: “Everything needs a PR”

✅ Teach people to do PRs and code reviews
✅ Build a culture of small (squashed) diffs

Step 2: “Wait, but it needs to be enforced”

✅ Configure branch protection on main
✅ Configure unit tests to run as PR checks

Step 3: “Wait, but we don’t have unit tests”

✅ Train team on unit test basics
✅ Select unit test frameworks that work with our code
✅ Provide a unit testing template and tutorial

Step 4: “Wait, but what about infrastructure as code?”

✅ Choose a deployment strategy (Canary, Blue-Green, etc.)
✅ Redo everything you just did

Step 5: “But wait, what about upstream/downstream services?”

✅ Schedule a meeting with your therapist
✅ Redo everything you just did
✅ Cry

And the list goes on… and on… and on.

The TL;DR here is:

1️⃣ If you have these things, don’t take for granted all the iterations that went into getting your team where they are today.

2️⃣ Iteration is key, even when it comes to engineering excellence. Start with something small (PRs), and keep layering on all the fun things you want to do to keep your services healthy.

(And if building this type of culture sounds fun, reminder that I’m hiring a tech lead and senior security engineer… don’t be shy about reaching out :p https://lnkd.in/gxaVFW4N)