Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Journeyman weeks - week three @ soundcloud


To find where I left off go here...

Leaving Bucharest behind

The break in Bucharest was really awesome. The ALE conference was as good as I remembered from Berlin in 2011. There's a certain vibe to this conference that is hard to describe. People generally seem to be very open and trusting and thus the conversations to be had are very interesting and candid. It felt very nice to be around friends old and new. And people were very encouraging of what I'm currently doing and very supportive. Which reminds me to point out the following. If you like what I'm doing please let me know in comments or on Twitter. It means a lot to me.

I stayed at quite historic grounds

I was still processing the impressions from Bucharest when I set out for Berlin. Arriving there I found my way to the interim SoundCloud office in Prenzlauer Berg. I was greeted by my old friend and former colleague Duana Stanley who had arranged my week there. We had never got to work on the same team while we were in ThoughtWorks, so I was looking forward to finally getting to pair up with her.

The interim SoundCloud office

We had briefly talked about what I could do wile I was there and one of the things I said I was interested in doing, was learning more about Android development. The Android team had been working on the jenkins CI build of their SoundCloud client and were happy to have Duana and me help out on some things there.

Their build consists of a fairly normal maven configuration that gets instrumented by a rake build file. That seemed like a much nicer solution to wrap filesystem and git tasks then trying to do that in maven. As we set to work, I was quite surprised by how much maven knowledge was still in my head. Since I haven't really worked with maven in two years and have been trying to forget its existence for longer than that, this was not what I had expected. (Just to be clear: this is not an implicit endorsement of other build tools.)

We managed to get our initial goal done fairly quickly, which clearly showed the benefits of pairing. Since some of that work was the usual drudgery of trial and erroring our way through different maven settings it was nice to have someone to share in the suffering as we pushed each other forward.

After that we tried to move parts of the build out into its own project. This took more time than I would have liked but eventually reduced the build time by a good minute. Duana quickly calculated that we would need about 1200 builds to make up for the time we invested in doing this. As we calculated a bit more I was surprised by how quickly this would pay back, if you consider that multiple people are running the build, many times a day. This led me to realise that I never really thought much about this in other instances of trying to improve build times and it seems painfully obvious now.

Sure everyone feels the pain when the build duration passes that magical 5 minutes barrier. And we feel compelled to improve things. And even 5 minutes is pretty awfully slow. But if you think about it in more concrete terms it gets highlighted. Improve the build by a minute with 3 pairs trying to build 10 times a day and you already get half an hour. By month's end you have already gained more then a full day. The very unscientific and fuzzy way of coming up with this number is balanced by the fact that you really should be building more than 10 times a day anyway.

Anyway, back to my week. Finally we got to work on a little feature for SoundCloud's android client. Since Android 4.1 notifications can have a different, expanded view when there is enough space in the notification menu. Getting this working for the SoundClound client was a nice, small fearure that cut through a lot of basic Android concepts. I got to do the layout for the big view and, while refactoring, learned how the notifications fit into the concept of Android's services. We decided not to add any extra functionality to it yet, because we felt that we wouldn't be able to finish it by the end of the week.

We didn't get around to writing much tests (shame on me) but learned that Robotium wouldn't be able to test the notifications anyway. But I think we managed to get the feature to a good starting position.

On Friday afternoons, SoundCloud has a demo session where people from across teams show what they've been working on. This seems to have most of the employees present and is followed by drinks and mingling. Duana and myself presented our results and I talked very briefly about what I am doing with this journeyman tour.

Large paintings of your favourite meme

I quite liked this get together and SoundCloud's company culture in general. SoundCloud is decidedly bigger than the other two startups I was at (and they're still growing) and I think it's at a critical stage where it becomes challenging to keep the existing close-knit culture. People were very open and helpful to me and I think there's still that sense of playfulness that makes startups fun. Also, they provide free pistachios and cashews (among other things) which meant I got pretty sick quickly because I have terrible impulse control when it comes to eating those.

While I was there I also got to meet some of the women working for the rails girls summer of code project. They all seemed really eager and doing fine so I was pretty happy to see that the project seems to be going along well.

I also went to another session of xtc Berlin. I think there were about eight people present and I was happy to see that it still lives on. It was also really nice to catch up with some people I hadn't seen in a while. Among which was Stefan Hübner, who reminded me about Euro Clojure, which I promptly bought a ticket for.

Next week I'm heading south to Bretten near Karlsruhe. Nicole Rauch and Andreas Leider have invited me to work with them at msgGillardon. I've never spent any time in that region of Germany so it should be interesting.