Key Challenges: Technology, Resources & Stakeholders

[00:00:00]
>> Erik Reinert: So we've talked about this one a little bit technology choices, right? Choosing the right technology stack for the system is crucial and can be difficult. I think this is definitely something that people deal with a lot, which is, how do I know the right technology to use, right?

[00:00:13]
And this even kinda goes to your question earlier of how do you guide yourself to do that? I think partially it's understanding as well as experimentation, right? If you've never used, one of the things I say on my Twitch stream is, I'm never going to recommend you something that I haven't built myself.

[00:00:36]
And that's because I can't comment on things I've never used in production or never have had experience around. And I think those technology choices are important to to answering how you're gonna build something like I said earlier and showing you the design of Kubernetes. I had really never used Kubernetes even at that level before, and even taking on my own serverless.g infrastructure, on top of that, it was a lot, and I didn't know how to troubleshoot that.

[00:01:05]
I didn't know how to debug it. Again, new technologies are cool, and they're really fun. But at the same time, if you can't support it, if you don't know how to handle things, when things go a fire or a flame. Or whatever you wanna call it, it just means that you're potentially putting yourself in a bad place in the future.

[00:01:24]
And again, it's fun to do those for projects you're working on the side, but you need to be a little bit more serious about the technology choices you're making when bringing them to a company. Flashy things don't always mean that it's good. Think about bugs and bug zappers.

[00:01:41]
Resource Management. So a big thing about this is basically are you allocating the right resources for the systems development and maintenance? And when we say resources, we mean anything. I'm not talking about just cloud resources. I'm talking about engineering resources, engineering time, manager planning, things like that can be really important to how much money you're spending.

[00:02:09]
One of the biggest things that companies do not consider when talking about technology is how many engineering hours are going into something. That's just completely a black box to It's like, well, we've already got them, but it's like, well, okay, but are you spending 900 hours at a given time period on something?

[00:02:26]
Well, no, nothing's free, and you just spent a lot more probably in engineering hours than you would have on the actual system itself. So resource management can be really crucial with architectures. And then again, the last one is stakeholder alignment. I've seen a lot of people try and make changes without getting stakeholders opinions and then make fights or make, let's just say challenging discussions of why did you do this?

[00:02:56]
Why did you make this change? What made you decide to do this? And again, as an engineer, that's kinda where you failed, where you didn't go to all the people and share, well, okay, this is how we're thinking about doing this. What do you think? Going back to culture and documentation and things like that, if you create that culture where you're opening up a conversation with engineering managers, stakeholders.

[00:03:23]
They're gonna feel more comfortable in the confidence with you as well in your decision making. So, it's good to get stakeholder alignment and make sure that you're talking to the right people who care. You don't wanna step on anyone's toes. And again, architecture design touches a lot of different parts of the system.

[00:03:41]
And so, you don't wanna make anyone not like, for any reason potentially the kind of approach you're taking. Unless, of course, it's a valid reason [LAUGH].