Past few months at work we’re trying to revamp our CI infra. This has been a migration from a Jenkins cluster to GoCD. This post is a result of my frustrations with the state of CI in the age of Git/GitHub.

With Pull Requests, or a form of pre-merge review process, it’s common to leverage a few automated checks alongside our human peers to remove potentially breaking changes from being merged into the repo. These changes typically require a CI server and often multiple CI jobs/pipelines to check test run / coverage results, linting, or any other policy that can be automatically enforced.

This is where you need to integrate your GitHub/what have you with your GoCD or the likes. And it’s a time consuming task for any complicated project. You essentially, setup pipelines that are somewhat duplicate to be executed pre and post merge. The more I think about, the more it feels like the whole CI process should be a headless one, and deeply embedded within the code repo. This would save unneccessary hassles such as setting up user accounts / notifications across multiple systems, navigating between web interfaces to see important logs when things fail etc.

I like the direction GitLab is taking. They have made CI part of GitLab UI so you can see the code and its build status in the same place. I’d like other CI environments to do the same, or at least be a little app/plugin that you can add on top of GitHub - to blend within the GitHub experience such that it doesn’t feel like a foreign object.

Finally, I defended my PhD thesis yesterday. Family, friends, and colleagues are all sending their wishes, and it feels great to have crossed this milestone.

To be honest, deep inside, I carry a sad and guilty feeling, which at times overshadows the feeling of acomplishment. This phenomenon is hard to write about, but I wanted to give it a try anyway.

So, it was 2012. Life was good. I got promoted to Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks and Shahana got a job almost immediately following the completion of her grad school. We spent an amazing vacation to end the year 2011, and the summer of 2012 was full of weekend trips to all the beautiful touristy places. That summer we also found that we were gonna be first time parents. It was an exciting time.

Along came fall. It started getting cold and wintery in Calgary. Both of us would be home by 5:30 PM, and would look for things to do to keep busy till bed time, which is about midnight. With slippery and often icy sidewalk, going for walks oudoors would mean a serious risk for the soon-to-be mom. So, we mostly stayed indoors. We were naive, and didn’t quite learn to enjoy the serenity of the “nothing to do” time. So, in one of such evenings, out of sheer boredom, I decided to shoot an email to my then ex-supervisor asking if he could meet to discuss potentially a part-time PhD admission for me.

He wrote back and we meet next week. He was quick to accept that request and also ensured that he’d be able to pay my tuition and expences as a scholarship, if required, for the full four years. I discussed this with Shahana and we decided to take this opportunity. Officially, the program would start in Fall 2013, about 5 months after the due date of our first born.

This is going to be a long read. But I’m writing it while it’s fresh in my memory from this overwhelmingly emotional time that I’m going through since the exam yesterday. This write up is an attempt to dump the different incidents that are showing up like storms in my mind at this time. I think it’s written for myself, more than anything. But I appologize if you’re reading this, since it’s a long format story, the format that most people don’t like to read online.

Back to the story, even though the program officially started in Fall 2013, I actually started working on my research right after we had our meeting. The first sub-project was to run a literature review on the area of interest for the PhD. This would give me a head-start in terms of positioning my research a whole year before enrolling officially. And I thought, I’d also get a feeling about enrolling into a PhD that’d help to “fail fast”, essentially I could call it a “quit” if I didn’t like the work before enrolling. Also, I switeched my job to join SourceFire, now part of Cisco, because the traveling projects with ThoughtWorks weren’t working for me anymore. I wanted to be with my wife, and international travels were screwing up with my Canadian immigration and citizenship requirements.

Life was still quite easy till the April of 2013. Then, we had our first born and it changed upside down. I think like most other first time parents, we had little idea about how much work it is to raise a little child on your own without substantial family support. To make things a little more challenging, the deadline for the first paper I wrote was about two weeks after Shopoth was born. In that two week, we barely got any sleep. But Shahana was adament, and let me take the time away to complete the paper on time. It felt good to be able to submit the paper. We both felt that it was doable.

Fast forward about a month. So, Shopoth is about 7 weeks old. My mother had left after helping us with the first few weeks of Shopoth’s life. We , the three of us, went for a walk for the first time around the beautiful tree-laden neighborhood of the varsity community in Calgary. I recall precisely, it was a beautiful early summer day. We just crossed a playground and turned left on a corner. My phone beeped signaling an email notification about the paper I submitted. It had this:

We regret to inform you that your submission titled …has not been accepted…

I felt sweaty, and wanted to keep it to myself. I could only do so for a few hours, and then shared this with Shahana. She was still recovering from the c-section, and was under a lot of stress due to the sudden changes in her life. I remember, she was saying only positive things about it and tried to encourage me to carry on.

As it happens, I moved on and decided to get into the PhD program anyway. During this year, I also got quite a bit engaged with things at the new job and started taking more responsibilities from a leadership perspective. To complete the course requirements, I’d have to complete at least three graduate courses, and transfer the credits from one of the courses I did while doing my MBA before coming to Canada.

Most people eventually come across a time when they’d need to provide names of colleagues as references while applying for a new job. The referees are often involved in the last stage of the hiring process, when the employer is generally satisfied that the candidate is a potential hire. At this stage, the employer expects to find a few things:

1. Verification of facts. The employer wants to confirm the validity of the information such as the role, responsibilities, and achievements provided by the candidate about their past experience.
2. Qualitative feedback. The employer wants to understand the “cultural fitness” aspect of the candidate by asking questions related to the individual’s interaction and collaboration skills.

While these are valid goals, I personally find the practice of using references to achieve these goals to be a rather flawed one. Here’s why:

1. References aren’t replacements for interviews. As an employer, the responsibility is on the employer to be smart enough to verify that the skills and experiences as advertised by a candidate’s resume reflect the reality. If the employer can’t do that with a reasonable amount of confidence, they’re likely to hire wrong candidates anyway.
2. Likely outdated. If a candidate is currently employed, due to the secret nature of most job searches, they are unlikely to use one of their coworkers as the referee. As a result, the longer a candidate is employed by the most recent employer, the more outdated the references tend to get.
3. Likely tampered. If a candidate wants to use a referee, they’d generally contact ahead of time with the referee. Even if they don’t contact, the candidates are likely to mention names of people that are almost certain to say good things about them. For any qualitative feedback, this setup limits the possibility of getting any negative traits of a candidate.
4. Open to interpretation. Reference checks are often done over phone. Also, the person calling to check the reference often hasn’t met the candidate during the interview steps. This creates a double-blindness of sort. So, anything said during the reference check process suffers from possibilities of information gap.

In my opinion, if reference checks are used, they should only be used to verify factual information. That too, should be done keeping in mind that the information may be outdated, or intentionally biased.

You didn’t go to college to study computer science and you have no background on computer programming. You’re not quite happy with your current job area, and looking forward to something more rewarding and exciting. You’ve heard software development is generally a good area and often times people without any prior software background can actually get a job. But where do you start?

First, you’re thinking in the right direction, and I can assure you that if you like making things and have a nack for problem-solving, you can learn the skills to become a programmer. Now, let me share a path forward from here:

1. Take an online course and learn a programming language. I’d suggest learning the programming language Ruby, using the courses offered by CodeSchool

2. Build a demo application. Here’s an idea: Make an app for tracking personal expenses so that you can enter all your expenses and see reports about your expenses on a weekly / bi-weekly / monthly basis by type of expense such as food, transportation, accommodation, utility etc.

3. Publish the application to the internet. Use Heroku to pubish your app to the internet and use it for yourself. When things don’t work as expected, fix bugs or extend the application to better serve your needs.

I’d say spend about 6 months on the steps 1-3. Once you’ve an application that you’re somewhat proud to show to your friends or prospective employees, it’s a sign that you’re progessing. But don’t apply for jobs just yet. I’d suggest spending another 6 months to learn a few more fundamental programming topics:

1. Algorithms: Take an online course on basic algorithms to understand the different types of algorithmic approaches that can be used to solve known problems.
2. Data structures: Take an online course on data structures since you’ll need to use them on a daily basis and this is one of those topics where it’ll be hard to learn on the job from no prior background.
3. Object oriented concepts: Take an online course to understand the fundamental concepts behind object oriented programming. It takes years to master the concepts, but taking a course will greatly help you to get the basics right.

If you spent a year of your free time (8-10 hours a week), you’ve now acquired the basics that will be required to find a job. Obviously, you can squeeze it in a much smaller time window if you dedicate more time and already have some background with math / computing skills. But at a mimimum, I think it’ll take six months for most people to get there.

Now, I’d suggest you to take two bootcamps. The bootcamps are great in two ways. First, you get to work with peers and immerse into building something. Second, you can judge yourself against the peers to understand where you stand against the pros and newbies. Take notes and get ready for a second bootcamp. This time, the idea is to understand if you’ve improved since the first bootcamp and able to perform better than the first time.

After the bootcamps, if you’re feeling positive, it’s time to start looking for jobs. Make sure to find a job that matches your skills and keep an open mind about accepting a job that may not pay top dollars yet. If you find a job, and you’ll, go ahead and take it. You’ll be learnig at a fast pace on the job, and if you’re good, you’ll be rewarded accordingly either on the current job or on a new job. The idea is to focus on learning on the job, but also off the job to learn topics that may not be of interest on the job.

If you followed this plan, I expect you to get your first job as a programmer in 1.5-2 years, and get profecient in 4 years. Prepare accordingly. May be the 4 years is worth when you consider you’ll be happier and better rewarded for many more years to come.

No matter which side of the table you’ve sat during interviews, you’ve probably heard this question: ‘Why do you want this new job?’

In the recent past, I’ve interviewed a few candidates and heard the following answers so far:

1. I’m not learning much on the current job after it’s been 2-4 years.
2. I’m looking for something that offers better work-life balance.
3. I’m not really looking for a job. The recruiters got in touch and I thought I’d discuss.
4. I’m looking for more challenging work.

All of the above are valid answers. I think there’s another perfectly valid answer that candidates seldom mention probably due to the gravity of the interview room situation. I’ve interviewed over a hundred candidates across different companies and am yet to find anyone that mentions: I am not happy with my current salary and benefits compared to my skills

Back to topic of answers. So, when someone answers that they are not learning new things on the job, obviously, you’d be curios to know why and how they have tried to change things. Unfortunately, most candidates simply mention that they are doing repeat work and there’s not much to learn doing the same thing over and over again. This is where I start feeling a little uneasy. However, I understand that it’s a true statement. If you’re in a similar situation, here’s some suggestion: read books, and write code based on what you’ve read. Then, you can tell a much convincing story that, I’ve forced myself to learn new things and here’s some proof, but I really want to apply the newly learned skills outside the scope of the “hello world” skills.

About work-life balance, I totally hear you. And if your current job doesn’t suit what you need out of your life, it’s a perfectly valid reason to look for new opportunities. However, make sure you’re able to clearly set the expectation with your potential employer about what work-life balance means for you. For example, if you can’t work over 40 hours a week, or must work from home one-two days a week, it’s best to discuss this even before an interview starts to ensure you’re a good match with the employer.

If you showed up at in interview just because a recruiter got in touch, I’d say introspect first. It’s possible that on our subconcious mind you have expectations that the potential of the new job offers you something that you don’t get at the current job. So, instead of a passive asnwer that the you simply acted based on the recruiter’s invite, it’s much convincing to see if you can lay down one or two things that you expect from the new job that you don’t get at the current job.

About looking for more challenge, it sounds like a cliche unless you can share examples of work that is of challenging to you. May be you like the challenge of using more complicated algorithms, may be you like dealing with a lot of data, may be you like supporting production emergencies, but there’s gotta be something that you can explicitly mention as challenging. It helps employers to understand if they’re able to provide you with enough challenge on the job.

Finally, if you’re looking for a new job because the current job isn’t paying upto the level of your skills and contributions, make sure to communicate it clearly as well. With salaries and benefits, I find it much easier to work with people that know the actual $ figure that’ll make them happy instead of beating around the bush to create confusions all around. Just be confident and tell what makes you happy. If the employer can afford it, most likely they’ll want to get you onboard as a happy employee. If they can’t afford it, they’ll do their best. The key here is to be explicit about what you want and be sure and confident about it.

In a nutshell, when you walk into an interview it’s yours to lose. The potential employer is investing their time and resources and would rather have you hired than having to interview other candidates. As long as you are able to justify why you want the new job, they’ll be quite accommodating.

2017 will be the year to get closer to my PhD defense, and spending my time with family and dear ones. It means a stricter control on the daily use of social media. That’s pretty much it.

I’ll sharpen my focus on events and matters that I can influence with the aim to get better at achieving the most within my limited circle of influence. This is a fairly small circle; myself, family, team at work, and a handful of friends.

Wishing everyone a happy new year.

2016 Highs and lows

Baby #2, it’s a girl

Shera, our little daughter, was born this year. She has been happy, healthy, and an absolute source of joy. Almost hard to believe that we somehow sustained the pregnancy period of my wife, while also running after our active toddler son, Shopoth. Such a pleasure to see the two already reaching for one another, cuddling, giggling, and occasionally fighting.

Canadian Citizenship, eh!

I’m very glad and proud to be a Canadian citizen starting this year. I just realized that I spent 21% of my life in Canada already! For those of you that haven’t been to Canada yet, you should visit some time for it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth with people of good heart.

Life & Work, well balanced

Mostly doing 40-hour work weeks and working from home once / week. The team I’m managing has built up on solid foundations now. This is super exciting to see motivated people working on challenging projects and consistently delivering quality outcome.

Personal finances, thumbs-down

While the return on my experimental investing portfolio has been great, I didn’t make good on the car-buying decision. Ended up getting into a 4-year lease on a car that has more seats than our living room, and we only really needed it for the summer while we had family with us.

Health, got lazy

Honestly, it was a tough year to dedicate time for health. I know you’re thinking “it’s a lame excuse.” On the bright side, our team won the friendly soccer tournament this summer, and played soccer almost each of the Friday nights starting October. However, I got lazy otherwise. Probably also just too tired from the kids and housework at times.

Relationships, so-so

Met some friends and had a few phone calls with friends throughout the year. But, I failed to connect with relatives outside my first family. This is likely a result of being so far physically, but also something that only gets worse unless actively taken care of.

Remote work, didn’t work too well

We spent the first month of 2016 in Bangladesh with family. It was my first time experiment working remotely with a 12 hour timezone difference. It was fun to start. But I could feel the stress of having to stay up till 2-3AM each night and dealing with Internet latency issues. While I had a decent accommodation and a makeshift office arrangement, it got harder to get enough sleep. Next time if I work remotely, I will limit my commitment to midnight.

Misc. things

1. Continued our charity program financing to support education in Bangladesh.
2. I didn’t have any public speaking session in the whole year for the first time in past 10 years.
3. Ended up spending too much time on social media for little gain.
4. While made some progress towards my PhD thesis, didn’t submit any paper.

There’s a 2nd post coming about the new year’s resolution. Come back in a few days.

I have finally been able to attend a RailsConf, the 2015 edition was my first ever. And I got to say hi to people like @dhh, @wycats, and many more. Thanks Cisco for sponsoring this trip.

The attendance on the conference was totally amazing, heaven knows how many, but it looked like a couple thousands of rails developers attended the @dhh keynote. And @dhh delivered a good one. Unlike the last year’s talk, this year it didn’t cause a huge noise because it was mostly about announcing new features of rails to be released with Rails 5. However, some rails core committers took it to twitter to share their surprise when they heard about Action Cable for the first time at the keynote. But everyone kept it limited to some trolling!

The @tenderlove keynote was the one that I really liked of all the talks that I attended. He is expected to be funny, and in front of a hall full of rails developers, he indeed delivered a fun talk, mixed with some serious performance improvement techniques and amazing new feature announcements coming with Rails 5. I envy his presentation skills. He talked about performance testing bundler on a system with a hundred thousand gems. It was quite fascinating to see how he was able to improve a polynomial time algorithm into a constant time one to cut down bundler boot up time, essentially speeding up all rails and ruby applications. Great work.

Of course, the conference talks are made available on videos and are open for anyone to watch. However, attending a conference is more about meeting people on the hallways than about listening to their talks. At least to me, that’s what I want from a conference. For example, I met Chris, a guy that was working on a gem to wrap InfluxDB interface under an active record like abstraction. Thought that was cool. Met a guy named Charles, who works for a startup company writing software for automated airline landing. Met a guy named John, who writes his own online game.

For an opinionated framework like Ruby on Rails, I expect it to come pre-bundled with a CoffeeScript based test framework and test runner. Here’s why:

• Teams don’t need to waste time deciding which one to use among the mess of Jasmine, Mocha, Expect, Sinon, Chai, Bower, Grunt, Teaspoon, Npm… you name it.

• It’d work better than what’s out there since the Rails team will focus on clean integration with Rails and will have a much larger user base to collect contribution from.

I’d prefer Jasmine to be the test framework and a runner similar to teaspoon that can run the specs both on the command line and on the browser, with asset pipelines enabled.

Rails made a huge promise to test automation by shipping with a nicely structured way to test the ruby code and doing the same for JS would make life better for so many people like me, I believe.

Let’s face it, the manual process of documenting REST APIs sucks big time. The process goes like this:

1. Craft a cURL request for an API Endpoint.
2. Copy the response.
3. Narrate the API, paste the cURL and response on an editor.
4. Edit the response, describe necessary request and response headers, query parameters etc.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for each of your tens of Endpoints.
6. Publish the documentation on the web.
7. Repeat these steps for each release.

This is a laborious process. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Meet SpyREST to see how it produces purely organic, automated, replayable, published, version aware and customizable API Documentation for you.

This is how it works:

1. You script the API calls using any scripting you prefer, including bash/cURL, automated test frameworks, etc. For example, using a test framework:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

describe 'gists' do
  it "List a user's gists since a time:" do
    response = Github.get '/users/smsohan/gists?since=20140101T00:00:00Z', @common_options
    assert_equal 200, response.code
    refute_nil response.body
  end
end

1. Use the SpyREST http proxy http://SpyREST.com:9081 to perform this call on a real API.
2. You get the same response, and SpyREST produces a fully baked API documentation as you see here:

Try here if you want to see for yourself:

1

curl -k -x "http://spyrest.com:9081" -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" "https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_GITHUB_USER_NAME/gists"

See the documentation at

http://spyrest.com/api_resources/gists?api_host=api.github.com&api_version=v3

Drop me a line if you’d like to use this to publish your API documentations.