In mid-2020 I joined Lemonade as Engineering Team Lead. Here are 4 things I did to succeed.
In June 2020 I joined Lemonade as Engineering Team Lead. Though I had past experience as an Engineering Manager, it was my first time joining a company in a management position. In addition to the common fears of starting a new job, and onboarding in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, joining as a manager raised unfamiliar concerns and self-doubts.
- Will I form solid personal relationships with the engineers in my team?
- Will I be able to build trust with my colleagues, especially…
Three lessons from my three years at BigPanda
After three amazing years, my time at BigPanda and a significant chapter of my professional life, has come to an end.
During this time, the organization grew from a 30-employee startup to a well-established ~120-employee company with many Fortune 500 enterprise customers — and I matured with it.
I transitioned from an individual contributor to an Engineering Manager. I had the opportunity to learn countless important lessons, in various fields, from Product and R&D, through management to sales and marketing.
It would be hard to share everything I learned in just one blog post, so I’ll focus on 3 major…
Summary of the talk “Rick and (post)Morty”, given at DevOpsDays TLV 2019
During DevOpsDays TLV 2019, my partner in crime Erik Zaadi and I gave a talk with the title “Rick and (post)Morty”.
What started as a joke a few months before the conference, turned out to be the most enjoyable presentation I have ever given.
The talk enabled us to combine three of our greatest loves:
- Software Engineering
- The genius animated science fiction sitcom Rick and Morty
- Using numerous MEMEs and GIFs
Dynamically skip JavaScript tests at runtime with Mocha
Mocha is a popular JavaScript test framework for Node.js & the browser.
Unlike other test frameworks I’ve used before, it is really simple and quick to start with.
One of the most common actions when writing or debugging tests, regardless of the framework used, is being able to ignore some tests.
That is especially true if you practice TDD, or tend to first list the placeholders for the tests you plan to write.
This inclusive ability is available in Mocha by appending .skip() to the suite or to specific test cases. …
A postmortem session from Reversim Summit 2019
It was a quiet Sunday at the office. We deployed an innocent looking change to some legacy code. We were happy… for 24 hours. Then our support team got in touch to tell us about clients reporting an issue. It was quickly linked to our, now notorious, patch.”
These are the opening words of the abstract for my talk at Reversim Summit.
As a regular participant, I was thrilled to hear that this year, the organizers introduced a new type of session: Postmortems.
The opportunity to share the events of an infamous outage, as well as the mistakes leading to…
R&D organizations have various technical interview approaches, as part of their recruiting processes.
The company I work for, BigPanda, practices a take-home coding challenge, to help determine the quality and technical fit of the candidate.
Once the task is reviewed and its level passes the needed bar, an interview takes place in which the candidate has the opportunity to present her/his work, explain her/his design decisions and answer a wide range of questions.
The purpose of the post is not discussing whether this process is better than others, as countless other blogs, talks and threads have already gone under and…
Over the past few years, I’ve attended a fair share of software development conferences, some even as a speaker.
the night before every conference I find myself thinking what should I bring with me?
In most cases, at some point during the conference I realize that I forgot something, regretting not planning ahead better.
And so I figured, why not make a checklist and publish it, in hopes others would find it beneficial. Stay tuned as I continue to update it as I come up with more valuable tips and suggestions in the future.
Plan Ahead!
Software development conferences offer many opportunities…
In my previous post, I explained how to set up a NGINX server with custom modules using Vagrant. As it’s often the case when working on Infra/DevOps tasks, once you’ve got the task done you’re likely going to repeat it, and that’s where automation enters the game.
There are various good configuration management tools out there. As you probably guessed from the title, I chose Ansible for three main reasons:
- Ansible is simple. while it is both powerful and secure, it doesn’t require any special coding skills and pretty much “human readable”. …
It has been a few years since I last played with NGINX.
This, together with the fact that my recent move to a new startup included a change of dev environment, Linux (fedora) to Mac OS X, made the task mentioned above a little more challenging.
I was working on a POC which required setting up NGINX as a reverse proxy, with Modules not included by default.
There are two ways to install NGINX Open Source:
- From a pre-built package: includes most NGINX official modules; can be installed on Mac OS X with homebrew:
$ brew install nginx - Compiled from…
Daniel Korn
Software Developer; Engineering Manager at Lemonade 🍋 https://twitter.com/korndaniel1 https://danielkorn.io/
