It’s been a while since my last post here, not because I’m lazy (which I am), but because as you know I recently changed jobs. It’s been almost a month at my new place, and now I feel confident to say that I joined Grafana Labs as an SRE for the internal cloud platform!

Today is my first day as an SRE at @grafana !!! pic.twitter.com/HMER6vcoNp

— Lean (inkel) (@inkel) March 1, 2021

For most of my career I worked as a backend developer, only dabbling sporadically into an operations role, so I would be lying if I said that impostor syndrome didn’t kick in during my first few days at this new role, but luckily my team is super friendly, helping, and understanding, and my confidence is getting bigger as days pass. I think I made the right decision deciding to jump into this new adventure.

Switching jobs is never easy, specially after almost a decade at my previous work, and thus some of my schedules were affected, like the weekly cadence of newsletter or writing into this blog. I hope to get back into rhythm soon.

This past month I’ve spent it mostly going through the onboarding process, getting to know my team, some other teams' leaders, and familiarizing with the codebase and tools like Grafana, Loki, and Tanka. And I’ve even found the time to add a performance contribution to a third-party library!

There are still lots of things to learn, but for now I’ll continue to learn more about this amazing company and the work I’ll be doing, improving my skills, and learning a few more tricks. The future looks really bright!

Today is my final day at Theorem after almost 10 years. It is a day full of mixed feelings for me, as I’m excited for what’s waiting for me next week (more on that, well, next week) and I’m saddened for leaving this amazing team of friendly and talented human beings.

When I joined the Citrusbyte, how it was named at the time, we were less than 20 people working in a hectic but fun and creative environment. And while it might seem hard to believe, that same spirit is still around all these years later, although luckily is not (that) hectic anymore.

Not only the company grew throughout but so did I. I went from being a single guy who had just bought an apartment doing nothing more than programming and reading all day to a father of two and owner of a house. And this company always had my back because all of us employees are treated like people.

But I digress…

Yesterday I’ve got a farewell Meet call with lots of teammates, and I would be lying if I wouldn’t say that afterwards my ego was the size of a continent, I’m happy and proud of leaving a mark on Citrusbyte/Theorem’s culture, and I will forever be grateful and honoured for this past decade. And who knows, maybe someday I’ll return with new tricks to share.

It’s finally over. This awful year has ended. My work life hasn’t changed much, although I had to organize my work blocks in a better way. My personal life, on the other hand, was quite affected, specially for my kids and partner; they were the most affected by having to start kindergarden classes via Zoom (my kids), and almost completely stop they work life (my partner).

I did manage to do some stuff that I find nice to share, and hopefully will continue doing in 2021:

• I dedicated more time to this blog again.
• I have a newsletter now; please go and subscribe!
• For the first time in my life I joined the Advent of Code, although for different reasons I’ve stopped working on the challenges; I’m planning on continue with them in my upcoming vacations.

I don’t believe in magical dates and I know it’s not that January 1st, 2021 will be automatically better: COVID-19 still exists, travel is restricted, the economy in this country (Argentina) isn’t getting any better, etc, but I’m looking forward to see what the new year will bring and work on making things better, not only for me, but for my family.

One thing I like to do is collect links for reading later, and let’s be honest, who hasn’t? I also usually share some interesting links with folks at work, where I made myself the fame as the links provider. So that got me thinking: why not creating a newsletter where I can share these links with a broader audience? So thank you to Buttondown I now have a newsletter for you: inkelinks.

Besides the newsletter I’ll be posting the links on this blog too, for those who prefer it that way. But I suggest using the form below so you don’t miss any weekly links!

If that doesn’t work for you, you can still subscribe from the newsletter homepage.

For years I disliked playing games. Never before in my life I had a gaming console, and the last game I played from start to end was The Secret of Monkey Island. But a couple of years ago I decided to buy a PlayStation 4 and I’m extremely happy with that decision. The main reason was of course to start playing myself, but also to raise my kids in a house where gaming is “normal”.

Why did I wait so long?!

I don’t think I’m a hardcore gamer, not even close, but since I bought my PS4 I play at least one hour almost every night, as a way of cooling off my mind before going to bed. I find it very relaxing and entertaining. I mostly play solo games, the idea of working online with others doesn’t attract me, as I take this time as a me time and I don’t want to engage with others. I know that I’m missing lots of fun, or so I’ve been told, but I’m happy with this decision.

Over the course of the upcoming months I’ll try and leave some “reviews” on some of the games I played so far:

• Horizon: Zero Dawn
• God of War
• Uncharted Saga
• The WItcher 3
• Detroit: Becoming Human
• Mass Effect: Andromeda
• Spider-Man
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• The Last of Us
• Dragon Age: Inquisition

I cannot finish this post without saying this: the very first game I played, Horizon: Zero Dawn, I fell in love with the character, the world, and the story behind it:

I always liked the interviews at Uses This, I find it really interesting knowing other people’s setups. And given that I do not foresee them interviewing me anytime soon, I went ahead and wrote my own.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Leandro López, better known on the Internet as inkel (all lowercase). I work as a software developer at Theorem, mostly doing backend programming but also dabbling in operations when needed. I’m interested in programming as a science, machine learning, DevOps (whatever that means), and keeping systems running.

What hardware do you use?

My main machine is a MacBook Pro 2015 15", which I love. I’ve also have a secondary Dell XPS with Windows 10. Meh.

I, like everyone else, do not like the new butterfly keyboard, and because of that I’m using a Keychron K2 as an external, mechanical keyboard; I love this keyboard, it’s clickly but not too loud, it can connect to up to 3 devices and seamlessly change from one to the other by pressing a couple keys. The only thing I miss in this keyboard is a Touch ID reader.

For a long while my hands travelled from the K2 to my MBP touchpad, and that was becoming tedious. I love the touchpad, but buying an external one was costly in Argentina, and thus I bought a trackball for the first time in my life, as I also wanted to give them a try. I’ve got a Logitech Ergo MX and boy am I happy with it. It didn’t take me too long to get used to it, and while it’s not the same as the touchpad, it is customizable so I can do many things without leaving my hand off the trackball. Still, I would like for it to have a couple more buttons so I can customize it even more.

As I work in a 100% remote company, calls are something that happen almost daily. For that reason I use mostly Apple EarPods, they work just great. At my office I’ve a pair of Logitech G533, which sounds great and are wonderful, but have two main issues to my taste: 1. they are not Bluetooth, you need a USB receptor connected to your computer; 2. after 15 minutes of audio silence (i.e. no audio coming through the speakers), it powers off, which is troublesome if you are doing a presentation and the rest of the audience is muted; I’ve already felt the pain of talking and talking and talking and people trying to tell me they couldn’t hear me but I couldn’t hear them either because the headset was off. Sad emoji. I’ve also bought a pair of Philips SHB3075, they are comfortable and 100% Bluetooth, but for some reason they don’t work well with my MBP, so I’ve them paired with my iPhone.

When mobile I use an iPhone 8, one that needs a change because my screen shattered. I started using iPhones since the iPhone 5 and never looked back. They are fast, pretty, and just work, as anything from Apple. Are they expensive? Yes. Are they worth it? Hell yes.

I prefer reading physical books than ebooks, nevertheless, I’ve an iPad Mini mostly for just that. It’s a great device with an excellent size for reading and taking from one place to another, without being a fullsized iPad.

Last but not least, as a developer I spend most of my days sitting, and I’m over 40, so a good chair is more than just luxury. Because of that I own a Erasmo Onix, and my life (and back) has been happier ever since. I cannot stress enough how much I recommend to spend serious money on a good chair.

And what software?

On my main computer, macOS as the operative system. It’s pretty, it works, it makes me happy. But I know I’ve to upgrade to Catalina soon.

Given I’m a developer, most of the things I write happens in Emacs. My init.el is far from perfect and I’ve neglected updating it for a long time. Sometimes I use Visual Studio Code (VSCode) or Visual Studio for Mac, but I always end up coming back to Emacs.

When I’m not on Emacs, I spend most of my time in a few iTerm2 tabs. I’ve tried other terminals like kitty, and while much faster, it’s definitely nowhere near in UX. Besides using tabs I also use tmux a lot. A LOT. My tmux.conf is adequately updated to my tastes, although it could use some improvement. Yes, I’ve heard about iTerm and tmux integration; no I haven’t tried it. I use Bash. I’m super comfortable with it, so I’m not looking to change to another shell in the short term.

Writing Markdown is something I find myself doing every so often, and for that, I use Typora. It’s beautiful, elegant, fast, I love it. I might switch to Bear, though, as I’ve been trying it on my cellphone and it works really well, even without the Pro features; I might upgrade to Pro soon, still haven’t decided. This blog is using Typora for the content and Hugo as the static site generator.

My other computer runs Windows 10. Windows as an operating system has improved a lot over the years, but it’s still, in my opinion, not very developer friendly as an operating system. For writing code, Visual Studio is undoubtedly one of the best IDEs there is, although of course mostly tied to developing within the Microsoft platform. I also have VSCode installed: sometimes I just need something that loads fast for quick edits. SQL Server Management Studio is another great tool though it feels a bit dated. CLI is where I feel Windows fails the most, and while the new Windows Terminal looks promising, it still lacks the smooth UX that other terminal emulators like iTerm2 have. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is another great addition to CLI on Windows, but again, still a bit clunky.

Languages are varied: I really enjoy writing Ruby, love toying with Go, have enough fun to work with .NET Core and C#. I like to have as much infrastructure as possible described using Terraform. And I really, really love writing scripts using Bash, AWK, sed, curl, and jq.

Last but not least is The Cloud. Nothing surprising there: GitHub for own and Open Source code, and some work related stuff. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for hosting stuff.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d love to get my hands on one of the newer MacBook Pro 16" with at least 32 GB of RAM and an SSD of at elast 1TB. I don’t think I’m going to try a new mechanical keyboard for the time being, but the Keychron K8 looks like a good future replacement. Similar with my mouse, I’ll continue with my Logitech Ergo MX, but also looking forward to get an Apple Magic Trackpad 2.

I’d like to improve my communications setup, probably by getting some AirPods Pro, or a cool Bluetooth headset.

My office needs some love, and due to the Covid-19 pandemic I’m not even going, but once back I’d like to have one or two external monitors, and a good microphone. I don’t have anything in mind yet, though.

As said my phone needs a change, and I’m looking forward to buying an iPhone 11. I’d also like to leave my computer at the office but still having something portable and comfortable at home where I can do some coding, and that’s why I’ve an iPad Pro in mind.

I want to have my office devices accessible from home, and thus I’m looking at using Tailscale. I’ve only heard amazing things about them.

After publishing my previous Working at Theorem: a typical workday article a co-worker asked me the following:

Can you go into the details of what happens during those “work” blocks? Do you frequently check slack_email or only check them occasionally? Are you heads down for parts of the day? Do you have dedicated “help_review others” time or does it happen ad-hoc?

This is an interesting question, so here are the answers.

Checking email / Slack

I approach these two differently. Email is something I check only when I don’t have any other task or when I’m in a break. I don’t have alerts or notifications when a new email arrives, so it’s a task that only happens in an active way. I consider email as the best asynchronous communication tool available, thus I treat it that way. I’ve several different filters that labels or archives emails as they arrive so when I check them I don’t have to lose precious time triaging everything that I’ve received.

Of course working 100% asynchronously is an utopia when working in a team that interacts with an external customer, so synchronous communication is a must; at work we use Slack for this. I’ve enabled notifications although I’ve also muted several channels that only generate noise or are mostly for announcements. I could leave those muted channels, however they are still important and I check them a few times throughout the day, usually after catching up with email.

I try to be conscious of how much affects others when mentioning them on Slack, so I try to keep usage of @here at a minimum, @channel only when it is urgent or very important; using @everyone is completely off the table, unless a catastrophe happens. And when it comes to direct messages I always try to send initially only one message: a greeting plus whatever question or comment I’d like to communicate; this way the other person can quickly decide to dedicate some time to me or not.

Code reviews

A big part of my day consists of reviewing pull requests created by other members of the team. I’m not going to go into the details of how you should behave when doing PR reviews, there are already hundred of posts dedicated to that: this is how I approach this task, YMMV.

First I start by reading the title and description. If those are good and informative then I’d approach the review in a better mood: good programming is mostly about communication, so I held prose to the same standards as code.

Second I look at each commit individually. Writing clear and well scoped commits makes reviewing easier, as you can better understand the author’s intentions. PRs with just one or two gigantic commits are a bummer and from time to time I try and teach people to write smaller commits next time.

Last but not least I look at the code in detail. The first things I look for is overall structure: is the code properly indented or doesn’t violate the rules and standards set for the project? Then I look at the semantics, trying to understand each decision, expecting to see well named variables and methods, easy to follow flow control statements, etc. I can be very nit picky at times, so I have to keep me at bay of not becoming an asshole. And yet there are times when you need to become one; luckily is not something that I need to do often.

PR reviewing is an opportunity for both the author and the reviewer’s growth as programmers and communicators. Treat it like as a learning experience and not as a chore.

Time management

With the current pandemic my working conditions changed quite a bit, even when I was already working remotely. The biggest change was on time management. When I worked from my office, I had some dedicated time for things like checking emails and Slack, for deeply diving into any tasks I was working on, and for reviewing code. Now those dedicated time chunks are gone, so I try to manage my time as follows:

• Checking emails and Slack is something I do first thing in the morning, before and after lunch, and during any coffee- or cigarette-break;
• Working on assigned tasks in 20 minutes chunks. Nowadays is hard to find long stretch hours of work, 20 minutes is a good compromise between I want to do something and gonna check the kids, have a break.
• PR reviews: I usually do them after the above mentioned 20 minutes. In the past I also scheduled this way, but after 40 minutes/1 hour instead.
• Lunchtime is something I’ve cleared out in my calendar, daily from noon to 1pm, so we have some routine for the kids. This I try to keep on schedule, so it doesn’t conflicts with my calendar. Of course it doesn’t always happens but so far it hasn’t been a problem.

Endnotes

As you can see I haven’t shared any truth revealing insights, though I hope it helps others getting more organized. This schema works for me; it might work for you or don’t work at all.

Interesting in working with me? Check our careers page and apply to any of our current openings. We are waiting for you ;)

I’ve joined CitrusbyteTheorem 9 years ago, and since day 1 it was a fully remote experience. Over the years I’ve learned lots about how to organize myself to approach each new workday although never gave much thought to it, until a few days ago, when while interviewing a candidate he asked what does a typical day at Theorem looks like. This post will try to address that question.

First and foremost, a disclaimer: by no means I speak on behalf of Theorem or the rest of my teammates; these are entirely my own experiences and do not reflect the reality of all the great people working at this company.

I live with my girlfriend and our two lovely kids (4 years old and 1 year and a half), so keep that in mind while reading this post.

As you are aware, at the time of writing this post we are living in very strange times, throughout a global pandemic that has most of the world in quarantine with people confined to their places and working remotely. As stated earlier, at Theorem we are 100% remote since the beginning, so the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t change much on how we work, although it had some effects.

Pre-pandemic typical workday

I have an office 20 blocks away from home, and my kids went to kindergarten 4 blocks away from the office, so days started at 6:15 am to enjoy breakfast with the family, then we would drive the kids to school, drop them and head to the office. My workdays usually started, then, at 8:00 am.

The very first thing I usually do any given day is going through my emails and any pending notification from the day before. If something requires my attention immediately I answer right at it, otherwise, I either archive or snooze the message to a later time if required.

Next is checking the status of any ongoing task I have been working previously, and paving the way for what’s next. Then, off to work.

Around noon either myself or my girlfriend goes to pick up the kids from school, and takes them home to have lunch, and then back to the office. If I’m the one picking them, I do that during my lunch break, and then have a quick bite or snack. Otherwise, I cook something for myself or order some delivery. During this break I might read or watch something.

Then the rest of the day goes on, until 4:00 pm or 5:00 pm, depending on the day, and walk back home. And that concludes a typical workday.

Typical workday during the pandemic

Things have changed, clearly. We don’t wake up anymore at 6:15 am, now it’s usually at around 8:00 am. Breakfast is served, and I use this time to catch up on some news and go through my emails and notifications, again snoozing for an hour or so whatever needs my attention; the rest is archived.

I’ve set up a standing desk in my bedroom, which is right next to the living room, where the kids spend most of their time playing. The biggest change since the pandemic was that nowadays I don’t have long stretches of work time anymore, so I try and split my tasks into smaller time schedules, so I can take a look at my kids, play with them or help them with homework (yes, even my 1.5 years old daughter has Zoom meetings now.)

Lunch and dinner are usually planned the night before, so at around noon either me or my girlfriend starts preparing lunch. The kids love this time as they get to watch something on Netflix. I had to cancel all my meetings during this time, but that doesn’t seem to have affected my work. Asynchronous communication works great!

After lunch work continues, and I might be able to get some work-only hours if the kids decide to nap, otherwise, again it’s split into smaller chunks of time. Either way, I’m still able to drive my commitments to success.

Conclusions

As you can see, not much has changed, other than how many hours in stretch I can work without interruptions. All other work details were already in place given that we are a 100% remote company. The biggest takeaway, for me, is that in order to survive this crazy new world we are living in, you need to work with great people, who understand not all experiences are equal, who trust you will work with professionalism and responsibility, and who you trust back in the same way.

If you like what you read and you would like to form part of this great team, check our careers page and apply to any of our current openings. Who knows? Perhaps your dream job is just waiting for you.

So here I am, once more, trying to have some sort of blog or journal. I’ll try to write about interesting pieces of code that I’ve written, problems I had to solve, books I’ve read (or dropped), et cetera. Don’t get your hopes too high, though, I’m lazy and tend to forget doing this kind of stuff.