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Surviving Your Tech Stack
Kevin Daly, lead digital architect at RBC Ventures, discusses the importance of careful stack selection and the pitfalls of over-engineering. He emphasizes that decisions should be based on cost, talent, and use cases rather than trends or hype. Daly stresses the importance of understanding people, technology, and processes in building effective software architectures.
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Surviving Your Tech Stack
- 1. Surviving your StackMAGING RETIREMENTWeb Unleashed2019 – September Kevin Daly - Lead Digital Architect – RBC Ventures kevin.daly@rbc.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-daly-50247a1b/ @therealkedaly
- 2. 2 Who am I? LeadDigital Architect for RBC Ventures • Architecture team is responsible for advising all Ventures on architecture • Encouraging and influencing best practices for Ventures Experienced cloud architect with over 20 years experience I’ve been building software and systems since I was 15
- 3. 3 Why should youlisten to me? • Because I know everything! I’ve been doing this for years!
- 4. 4 You shouldn’t! Your decisionsshould be based on •Cost •Talent / Personnel•Use cases•Data
- 5. 5 You shouldn’t! NOT! • Becausesome guy at a conference said so • You read a blog on the internet • LinkedIn or some other tech giant is using it!
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- 7. PROPRIETARY REWARDS INNOVATIVE PRODUCT LEADER PERSONALIZED ADVICE DATA AND TECHNOLOGY SCALE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS RBC’sdigitally-enabled relationship bank delivers considerably more value for clients DIVERSIFIED DISTRIBUTION $ $ $ 7 RBC starts with a better bank
- 8. RBC Ventures goes beyondbanking to deliver unique value for all Canadians BUSINESS MOBILITY CONSUMER HOME $ $ $ DIVERSIFIED DISTRIBUTION STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS PERSONALIZED ADVICE DATA AND TECHNOLOGY SCALE PROPRIETARY REWARDS INNOVATIVE PRODUCT LEADER 8 WELLNESS Now, we’re moving beyond traditional banking
- 9. Keeping you inthe know on the little things Making renting hassle free for renters and landlords Making moving hassle free Connecting consumers to trusted contractors Helping Canadian SMEs sell in China Helps entrepreneurs start their business Digital glovebox and servicing for car owners 9 Home search, reimagined BUSINESS MOBILITY CONSUMER HOME WELLNESS Tracking taxes for the self-employed BOOMERANG Helping retirees make connections Securing sale-by-owner payments Snapshot of ventures Helping Canadians make better spending decisions Helping you get more value Helping newcomers be successful in Canada Finding dream jobs for recent graduates Amplifying value for Canadians Making living with friends stress free Earn cashback at local merchants Public transit arrival times and locations
- 10. Things to consider Let’s getstarted!
- 11. 11 So what isa stack?
- 12. 12 So what isa stack? A software stack is a group of programs that work in tandem to produce a result or achieve a common goal. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27268/software-stack
- 13. 13 My view ofa stack Users •Build/Test •Develop•Commit •Runtime Environment• • ••Commit •Build/Test •Deploy ••Runtime Environmen t
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- 15. 15 So how doyou choose a stack?
- 16. 16 You are notGoogle! https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb
- 17. 17 A Cautionary Tale (TheHype Machine)
- 18. 18 Build powerful reactive,concurrent, and distributed applications more easily
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- 20. 20 akka is stateof the art! • Cool languages like Scala • Functional! • Reactive! • Concurrent! • Distributed! • We could run it on our Kubernetes cluster • Build out an AI System maybe • Kafka Cluster • maybe even build a Block Chain !
- 21. 21 But… • Distributed Applicationsare hard • Actors are a pretty new pattern • Clusters have some maintenance and support issues • Nobody at this company understood how this thing worked and the guy who wrote it left the company.
- 22. 22 So Why? • 100’sper second 100 * 60 seconds is = 6,000 per minute X 60 minutes 360,000 per hour X 24 hours 8,640,000 documents per day
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- 33. 33 Let’s talk productmarket fit and MVP
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- 36. 36 Can you doboth?
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- 40. 40 Why did wechoose this architecture? •People•Process•Technology • Hire talent easily Identify talent and hire from larger talent pool • Transferable internal skills Developers can support and switch teams as needed. • Simple Easily understood development stack • Rapid development cycle • Able to leverage open source and tech community •People •Technology•Process • Use leading technology AWS Cloud • Be scalable and versatile PostGres is an extremely versatile database. • Full Stack Development • Find support and knowledge NodeJS has a great community
- 41. 41 Lessons Learned “Thegood stuff” •Productivity + Cost •Job Candidate Availability•Consistency•Agility •Flexibility
- 42. 42 Lessons Learned “Gotchas” WTFIs a Full Stack Developer? What Happens with a partial product market fit? Technical Debt? Node Stack doesn’t fit every use case?
- 43. 43 Takeaways Understand your scalefrom a most pessimistic to a most optimistic view Don’t over engineer! Know the size of your market Avoid the hype machine!
- 44. 44 And the mostImportant Takeaway •People •Technology•Process
- 45. 45 Well Almost… FinalThought Dogmatically pursing a stack as a single source of truth is a recipe for disaster!
- 46. 46 Kevin Daly Lead DigitalArchitect for RBC Ventures Connect with me Email - kevin.daly@rbc.com LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-daly-50247a1b/ @therealkedaly
Editor's Notes
- #4 I’ve got years of experience I’ve worked as a Principal Engineer in the valley I’ve been part of successful startups <insert pause>
- #5 - Pretty much everything in this presentation is common sense Not enough decisions we make are data driven in tech - which is surprising for “engineers” - fashion is king (MongoDB, NoSQL, Cassandra, “Full Stack” – all things that promise Valhalla - often decisions are made on “My favorite tool” I personally fell in love with In Memory databases - tried to apply them everywhere - let’s all go for drinks! I’m done
- #6 - Pretty much everything in this presentation is common sense Not enough decisions we make are data driven in tech - which is surprising for “engineers” - fashion is king (MongoDB, NoSQL, Cassandra, “Full Stack” – all things that promise Valhalla - often decisions are made on “My favorite tool” I personally fell in love with In Memory databases - tried to apply them everywhere - let’s all go for drinks! I’m done
- #14 These are all areas where decisions need to be made
- #15 Your stack is an important part of your corporate culture It goes beyond technology I can build quickly in all of these different tech stacks React / ReactNative / NodeJS / PostGres Java / Flutter / Dart / PostGres .Net core Python
- #16 Choosing a stack is one of the most important strategic things a startup can do. You don’t have to choose your stack forever But you need to understand all of the ramifications of your choices But first…
- #17 - Engineering teams like to think that everything is a big problem to solve. Over engineering is a huge risk, building things that are way too complex to fit the use case Making sure you understand what you are trying to accomplish
- #18 We’re going to start with a story about epic over engineering Who here has ever over engineered something here? <pause to question audience> Started a new job as the Lead Engineer for a company, my first task was to look into their document ingestion pipeline Some new features had to be added There were some bugs and problems And to my horror, no documentation, and nobody knew how it worked. So what was required was to ingest documents from our vendors, and build an output document that would provide metadata to our servers about the content that we were publishing on behalf of our vendors. So I dug in!
- #19 Upon examination the pipeline was an Akka cluster In a nutshell Akka allows you to build massively distributed applications using something called the “Actor” pattern The previous architect had chosen akka for this ingestion engine
- #20 Everybody loves distributed applications Akka is “Web scale!”
- #21 - Pause for the end of the slide
- #22 Pause at end of slide…
- #23 Why was this built this way? Began to question the team and the answer was scale… Our current cluster can scale up to massive amounts of documents.. How many? Very small cluster, we could scale this up to 1000’s per second easily
- #24 So how many documents did we process a day?
- #29 10,000 documents a day could have been handled with a very simple function that would be Easy to understand Easy to deploy The takeaway here is don’t over engineer things Add that Akka is a great tool if you need it, and have the deepest respect for Lightbend
- #30 10,000 documents a day could have been handled with a very simple function that would be Easy to understand Easy to deploy The takeaway here is don’t over engineer things Add that Akka is a great tool if you need it, and have the deepest respect for Lightbend
- #31 10,000 documents a day could have been handled with a very simple function that would be Easy to understand Easy to deploy The takeaway here is don’t over engineer things Add that Akka is a great tool if you need it, and have the deepest respect for Lightbend
- #33 we’ve all probably seen this. It somewhat holds true for building products We need to balance the choice of moving quickly with building quality. So how much time do you have? Time to market Time to MVP
- #35 Don’t worry about the details, move to MVP Don’t worry about technical debt? Prove product market fit at all costs Throw it out once you prove product market fit Are there tools / stacks that you could use to build fast? Google App Engine FireBase AWS Lambda
- #36 Test driven development & TDD Environments Planning and roadmapping Continuous Delivery and Build
- #37 You can but it takes strategy Do a little bit of planning Identify uncertainties and put a box around them Is Build fast and break things a good idea? You may never get back to fix them. It’s a risk
- #38 What skills do you have? Who can you hire? What will it cost to hire these people? What are the side effects? A full stack developer might not have the depth of knowledge. You might not have funding to have specialized developers
- #39 Backend AWS NodeJS PostGres Docker Containers Frontend ReactJS Mobile - React Native
- #42 Agility AWS+Infra as code via Terraform enables agility, experimentation at low cost. This is instrumental in shaping and continuously evolving reference architecture. Consistency Declarative reference architecture has led to consistency across many projects. Consistency allows us to effectively and efficiently communicate our architecture to other departments. Flexibility Many options available to make minor customizations to infrastructure, for example RDS vs Dynamo. Productivity And Cost We manage over a dozen Ventures projects, numerous AWS accounts, networks with a very small IT operations team. Job Candidate and Availability AWS is leader in public cloud infrastructure Many job seekers list AWS experience along with other skills.
- #43 This slide is hard to read, but love this painting
- #45 Take a heuristic view of your stack it’s not all about technology, it’s about people You need to align your stack with your people and processes