Working with Remote Development Teams

February 24, 2019 ~ David Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Over my career I’ve worked with a number of remote teams in different contexts. From this I’ve collected a few lessons I’ve learnt. Like the best lessons, some of these have been learnt the hard way.

The TLDR version is: working with remote teams is similar to working with any development team, with some additional challenges. You have the same issues as you have with other teams, just with the added distance caused by timezones, communication and culture.

This advice is based my experience of working with teams that have been split between multiple locations, offshore development contracts or remote teams. There are real benefits to improving the working relationship, even if this is a shorter term contract relationship on a fixed price contract.

If you share an office with your team, you won’t have to think about these things, they come naturally through daily contact.

1. Remote people are people too

It’s easy to treat remote people as though they’re just the service they provide. The distance makes it so much easier to treat them as just a service. You feed them jira issues/Trello cards/emails, and they deliver the work. Simple, right?

That’s not how you’d want to be treated. There are people behind the code (or testing). Don’t think of them as a machine that you feed work into and get a result.

Unless you’re a sociopath, you wouldn’t think this of people you see every day in the office. However when you have no face to face contact with people, it’s easier to de-personalise them.

You need to actively strive to understand who they are. What do they enjoy doing most? How do they like to be managed? Where do they want to go with their career? What do they do outside work?

You know, the kind of stuff you’d do with someone who works in the same office as you.

2. Actively communicate

The reality of the distance between remote and local teams is such an issue that you need to take active steps to bridge the gap. The area where this is most seen is in communication. You need to build in processes that help people to communicate. This can be a real challenge when working with developers as they’re not the most communicative people in world to start with.

Some ways you can actively build this include:

Have a standup (this is really a basic)
Schedule one on one catch ups with them
Use more personal forms of electronic communication. Video is better than audio, audio is better than chat, chat is better than email.
Use tools that make keeping in contact easy, eg slack
Foster a shared culture
Ask for their input as much as possible

Of course, the best form of communication is still face to face. So if possible, either go and meet the people of your team or have them come to meet you.

3. Include them in your plans

Communication works both ways, so you need to look at communicating to them what is on your mind. Tell them what is important to you, tell them where you’re going.

Again, if you all work in the same office, people often learn this without having to be told. They overhear conversations and hear the emotion in people’s voices.

If you need to hit a critical deadline, explain what the impact is if they miss it and ask them to surface issues early. If quality is important, then make that clear, and explain why.

It’s important to help them understand not just what you want to do, but why.

4. Understand the culture

While people are basically people no matter where they are in the world, the culture people live in has a big impact on how they see the world. This is often the culture they have grown up, been educated in and worked in. It shapes how they work.

While not everyone is the same, people from the same culture often have a lot in common. The culture they have in common might be very different to your culture. You need to work at this, as by default you tend to assume that people will approach things the way you do.

For example, as someone who has grown up in Australia, I tend to have a lower respect for authority than many other cultures. As a result I’m inclined to challenge people more senior than me. As an Australian, I assume that other people will challenge me when I’m wrong. In Asian cultures, authority tends to be much more respected. If I were managing a remote team in Asia, I’d need to be very careful to ensure I gave my team lots of space to give feedback and encourage it when it’s given.

Read up about the cultures you’re working with and be aware. One of the best questions to ask yourself is: What do they value (achievement, impact, family, education, status etc)?

5. Be Genuine

Be yourself. Don’t pretend to be someone else to try to build a connection with the team. You might have to moderate how you express yourself, but you should always be yourself.

You want to build relationships with the people you’re working with, and you’ll only do that if you genuinely show who you are.

Conclusion

Working with any team of developers is often quite challenging. Working with remote teams can make some of the challenges even harder. However with it can be a very rewarding experience, where you learn more about other cultures and your own biases.

Managing Patches on AWS

January 28, 2019 ~ David Cameron ~ Leave a comment

During a quiet time over the Christmas break, I spent a little time looking for a better way to manage patching EC2 instances on AWS. It took a little while to put it all together so I thought this might help a few other people if I wrote it up.

We’re running EC2 instances (AWS Linux) as hosts for docker containers, so there isn’t a huge amount to patch. All the same, even a minimal install is vulnerable to attack through unpatched software (eg ssh).

Under the circumstances we want:

automatic patching with no human intervention
installing patches out of hours

AWS Patch Manager

Google led me to AWS Patch Manager, which looked promising.

I was far less impressed when I read the details of how this was implemented for AWS Linux. The 7 step process had a handy summary at the bottom:

Note

The equivalent yum command for this workflow is:
sudo yum update-minimal --security --bugfix 

So, essentially it’s just a wrapper around yum update. It’s really not clear how much benefit AWS patch manager brings for a smaller scale installation.

Installing the updates

Installing the updates was pretty simple:

yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y

This installs just security patches, answering yes to all questions.

In some cases updates require a reboot. While researching this, I found this great discussion, and added this:

needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r

To put it all together into a shell script:

#!/bin/bash
yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y
needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r now

Now we’ve got a script to install updates and handle reboots if required.

Running the update script

The scripts isn’t much help if we don’t have a way to trigger it. The most obvious thing to do is to add this as a cron task. Easy to do if you’re logged into the machine, but you really want this built into your infrastructure configuration.

For EC2, the best way to do this is through UserData scripts, configured through Cloud Formation templates. There are some great examples of this here (see the section “Parameters Section with Parameter Value Based on Pseudo Parameter”), the YAML syntax is easier to work with.

I want to drop the update script into cron.weekly, which I can do using echo.

To build the update script, this becomes:

echo "#!/bin/bash" > /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r now" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh

There are a couple of other adjustments to make:

needs-restarting isn’t installed by default, so I need to install that: yum install -y yum-utils
The script needs permissions to be executed:
chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh

The full script is:

yum install -y yum-utils
echo "#!/bin/bash" > /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r now" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh

Controlling when it executes

One last issue, we don’t really want this installing updates at the wrong time. The simplest way to do this to adjust the hours when cron (actually anacron) runs. This means adjusting START_HOURS_RANGE and I also wanted to reduce the random interval range when the job runs within this range (RANDOM_DELAY).

It’s relatively simple to adjust the config using sed:

sed -i 's/START_HOURS_RANGE=.*/START_HOURS_RANGE=14-19/' /etc/anacrontab
sed -i 's/RANDOM_DELAY=.*/RANDOM_DELAY=20/' /etc/anacrontab

Putting it all together

The final UserData script is:

#!/bin/bash -xe
sed -i 's/START_HOURS_RANGE=.*/START_HOURS_RANGE=14-19/' /etc/anacrontab
sed -i 's/RANDOM_DELAY=.*/RANDOM_DELAY=20/' /etc/anacrontab

yum install -y yum-utils
echo "#!/bin/bash" > /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
echo "needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r now" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh

Putting this in context, with the YAML template:

UserData:
  Fn::Base64: !Sub |
    #!/bin/bash -xe
    sed -i 's/START_HOURS_RANGE=.*/START_HOURS_RANGE=14-19/' /etc/anacrontab
    sed -i 's/RANDOM_DELAY=.*/RANDOM_DELAY=20/' /etc/anacrontab

    yum install -y yum-utils
    echo "#!/bin/bash" > /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
    echo "yum update-minimal --security --bugfix -y" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
    echo "needs-restarting -r || shutdown -r now" >> /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh
    chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/install_updates.sh

This works fine for either individual EC2 instances or Autoscale Launch Configurations.

Final Thoughts

It’s a very long time since I’ve had to look at anything like this. The last time I looked at something like this was the early 2000s when I was hosting my own mailserver and fileserver on debian Linux.

At the time I used to add a script in cron.daily:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

What I find amazing is how much this hasn’t changed in over 15 years.

Password Storage Done Right

September 1, 2015 ~ David Cameron ~ Leave a comment

Storing & managing passwords is really hard these days. Passwords are easier to crack. Breaches to one system mean other accounts can be exposed. Even the FBI’s most wanted can’t get it right.

Even the systems you might depend on break.

Best Practices for Passwords

Lets just review best practices for passwords:

Use a complex password. A complex password is one that doesn’t include dictionary words or common phrases that might be used in a dictionary attack. This is getting hard as previously uncommon phrases can become part of a new dictionary. Ideally use a random password.
Use a long password. This will help defend against dictionary attacks.
Don’t use the same password. Ever. This is because if the password is broken in one system, it can be used to log into the other systems.

It needs to…

Just to make things easier, I personally use a range of platforms so I’m looking for something that runs on:

Windows
OSX
iOS

I also need to be able to retrieve, add and edit passwords on any platform. Changes on any one platform should sync to all other others.

It doesn’t need to…

I’m not looking for something that integrates directly into the browser. I’m concerned that something that is directly integrated into the browser is too much of a target for attack. This knocks out using something like Chrome to store passwords, aside from the issue that it can only store web based passwords.

Password based services like LastPass are also an issue, given that someone cracking LastPass can then access your entire set of passwords. These systems are a huge target.

Solution

Best practices are to use a password manager. Syncing was once a challenge, but now with platforms like google drive and dropbox are far easier.

So I use:

KeePass2 – works on Windows
MacPass – works on OSX
KyPass3 – works on iOS
Dropbox – to sync them everywhere

KyPass 3 supports syncing with a dropbox folder and the other apps just talk to the filesystem. It’s an awesome solution that lets you view / edit your passwords anywhere.

Windows 8

September 1, 2015March 21, 2018 ~ David Cameron ~ 1 Comment

Now Windows 10 has been released, I feel it’s worth putting together a highly subjective review of Windows 8.

What does it feel like?

For me, from the first preview buil, Windows 8 felt like the movie From Disk till Dawn.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, it is a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Quentin Tarantino is best known for gangster movies, Robert Rodriguez (at that time) was best known for horror movies.

The movie starts like a normal Quentin Tarantino movie, guns, hold ups, tough talk. Two fugitives are on their way to Mexico. They fight their way over the border to a bar.

Suddenly half the people in the bar turn to Vampires and the movie switches to a horror movie. The survivors band together to fight the vampires.

It’s not really one movie. It’s two movies with two directors with an abrupt transition from one to the other.

We’ve got Tarantino:

Then Rodriguez:

It’s a great movie. You should see if if you haven’t already.

Windows 8 isn’t one operating system

I do have a point here, I promise.

Windows 8 isn’t one operating system, it’s two. On one hand you’ve got the traditional windows desktop, largely the same sort of experience since Windows 98. You know, windows, desktop, explorer.

Then you’ve for the ~~Metro~~ Modern interface. This is the full screen, touch optimized interface.

There is zero continuity between them.

So what does it feel like?

This depends on the device you are using.

Tablet/Convertible – hey this is pretty neat
Laptop – doesn’t really make sense, but ok
Dual Screen Desktop – I want to stab someone

This didn’t really come home to me until I started using windows 8 on a dual screen desktop extensively. The ~~metro~~ modern interface, optimised for touch, doesn’t translate well to large screen displays. Or more than one screen.

The start screen taking over the whole screen is hugely jarring.

My pattern of usage is to start apps using Windows Key + start typing app name. Prior to Window 8, this was a relatively unobtrusive start menu. With Windows 8 it takes over the whole screen. And on a 24″ monitor I hate it.

With the release of Windows 10, it looks like Microsoft has acknowledged this.

Fixing a broken windows installation

June 14, 2015 ~ David Cameron ~ 1 Comment

I recently had a rather sick server that was exhibiting all sorts of weird behaviour. Applications pools under IIS were shutting down as soon as the site was hit. All sorts of weird stuff was happening. Event logs were providing nothing useful. Even trying to install IIS diagnosis tools failed.

Clearly a very sick machine.

Diagnosis

One of the challenges was what to trust. Clearly there were some underlying issues with the operating system. Once you go down that rabbit hole, where do you stop? Is the event log still working?

Where do you start?

I had the following info:

A web application that was working 6 hours before was now failing, without any useful errors in the event log. There was an exit code but I couldn’t find any info.
Diagnosis tools were failing to install
A colleague was reporting that some apps wouldn’t run

My best guess was that some of the operating system was corrupted in some way.

Solution!

In my extensive research (googling frantically) on this, I came across System File Checker. This runs through all system files and finds any files that might be corrupt.

I also found this rather helpful link that covers how to read the log files.

Resolution

The scan indicated an issue with a specific dll. I passed this onto a colleague who was able to fix the issue by uninstalling and re-installing windows updates. It’s a great tool to add to the toolbox.