Published in codeburst·PinnedManaging Managers: Words of Wisdom from Experienced Engineering ExecutivesI Asked Managers of Managers I Look Up To for Advice As I Transitioned From Team Lead to Director of Engineering — I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade. Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new challenge. I turned to managers of managers, whom I value and don’t work with on a daily basis, to gain a wider…Engineering Mangement7 min readEngineering Mangement7 min read
Published in codeburst·PinnedHow to Successfully Join a Company as Engineering ManagerIn 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…Engineering Mangement6 min readEngineering Mangement6 min read
Published in codeburst·Mar 22, 2020So Long, and Thanks for All the PandasThree 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…Transparency4 min readTransparency4 min read
Jan 18, 2020Everyday Engineering Lessons Learned from ‘Rick and Morty’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…Devopsdays6 min readDevopsdays6 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Jul 12, 2019Skip Tests in MochaDynamically 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…Java Script2 min readJava Script2 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Jul 3, 2019Nothing Good Ever Happens After 2amA 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…Outage3 min readOutage3 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Sep 16, 2018Secrets from the Interview Room — What Reviewers Look For in a Take-home Coding AssignmentR&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…Coding8 min readCoding8 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Nov 10, 2017Going to a Developers’ Conference? Be Sure to Go Through This ChecklistOver 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…Conference3 min readConference3 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Oct 11, 2017Using Ansible to Compile NGINX from Sources with Custom ModulesIn 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…Nginx3 min readNginx3 min read
Published in BigPanda Engineering·Aug 27, 2017Setting up a NGINX Server with Custom Modules on Mac OS X Using VagrantIt 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…Vagrant4 min readVagrant4 min read
