RUG::B

Making decisions by yourself is hard, let alone with a team. As developers, making good technical decisions in teams is key to our jobs yet we don't explicitly learn how to do that. Let's go through some principles and an example process for dealing with big technical decisions as a team.

Application metrics are a great source of information. They can be used to for monitoring and alerting. This talk will give an introduction about metrics and how Prometheus provides an open source platform for monitoring.

Imagine that you’re implementing a complex algorithm that encapsulates some business process at your company. The business stakeholders are pleased, but sometimes come to you with questions, such as

• Why is this calculation result so high?
• Can you please tweak some factors in the algorithm?

One-off requests like these are probably fine, but occasionally they can be so numerous that you end up spending a significant amount of your time dealing with incoming requests. (You have more interesting stuff to do!) Ideally, business stakeholders themselves would be able to figure out why that calculation result is so high, and would be able to change the factors themselves.

The implementation of the algorithm is in code -- and it is typically not feasible to let business stakeholders handle code. (They have more interesting stuff to do!)

We can move the algorithm’s implementation out of code and into data… and that yields us a bunch of interesting advantages.