Location: Accra Ghana & Ashburn, VA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Go, PHP, Python, Javascript, Postgres, MariaDB, DevOps, Linux,
Resume/CV: http://kwamenkansah.com/resume
Email: kwame.nkansah@gmail.com
Generalist/Founder with wide range. Spent last 4 years managing a team of 20+ engineers. Currently taking a sabbatical. Interested in modernizing legacy systems and platform engineering. Also willing to take on maintenance work for the right company.
Location: Accra, Ghana
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possibly.
Technologies: It's a long list (have worked both engineering & operations). Current stack is PHP, Laravel, Alpine, Tailwind, Docker, Hashicorp Nomad+Consul and some Python
Résumé/CV: https://kwamenkansah.com/about/
Email: kwame.nkansah@gmail.com
Summary: I've been building things that delivery business value for the last 15 years. I have experience working in health, education, finance & public sector.. Currently doing devops within the insuretech space and spend a lot of time figuring out how to make my teams more effective.
Currently 15months into a similar situation. Successful product with year on year revenue growth. Key lessons learned:
- You need to get an understanding of why things are the way they are. Team of 3 people seems small. Is the team always in firefighting mode due to business constantly dropping things in their lap.
- Do not attempt a full rewrite. Here be dragons & krakens.
- One of the first things to do is to get your code into source control before you do anything else. That gives you insight into how often the code changes and in what way it changes.
- The routing, templating, caching, curl requests, dependency management issues all stem from the no framework issue.
- You are going to face varying levels of resistance. Part of that is going to be from the business side of things
My suggestions:
- You need to get management to understand the problems and on board with reform as soon as possible. Avoid framing the issues as technical problems. Explain the potential risks to bottom line resulting from business continuity failure or regulatory/compliance failure (esp if your industry is health/finance/insurance). If management is not onboard, your reforms are very likely going to be dead in the water. Might be best to cut your losses.
- Get your code as is into git asap.
- You will need more hands. At the very least, you need a senior who can help hammer things into a structured pattern that the juniors can follow.
- Carrot is going to be much more effective for convincing your devs to adapt to new changes. Understand their pain points and make sure to frame things as not questioning their competence. The understanding needs to be that their time is valuable and should be spent on this that deliver the most value to them and to the business.
- Business unit needs to rework their aggressive roadmap. I suspect there's an element of 'we always have delays in releasing so we need to keep the pressure up on developers to keep momentum up". You need some kind of process in place for managing roadmaps (We're currently working our way towards scrum across the business. It's difficult but persistence even in failure is important).
- We've attempted rewrites of one of products. It took much longer than we planned (currently still in progress). What we're currently doing is using laravel as a front end to the legacy apps (laravel receives the request and passes it on to the legacy app in the same request) It is working well so far and has the advantage of allowing us to use laravel's tools (query builder, eloquent, views etc) in the legacy app. Then we can progressively modernize the legacy functionality and move it fully into laravel.
Also, remember to breathe and take a break now and then. Wishing you good luck.
If you want to talk more or just vent, hit me up at voltageek [at] gmail.com.
Dev Generalist with a decade of experience in API design, Infrastructure, IT/DevOps across a lot of industries
Location: Accra, Ghana
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Python, PHP, Go, Javascript (DEV)
Docker, Kubernetes, vmWare, KVM, Linux, ELK, Terraform
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/voltageek/
Email: kwame[dot]nkansah[at]gmail[dot]com
My work history has had be alternating between dev heavy and ops heavy roles. Currently I spend much of my time helping dev teams with system architecture and getting some structure into their projects. Day job is in financial services and is fintech heavy (mobile money, payment services, e-banking services)
Anyway you cut it, she's probably going to have to pick up some basics coding skills to become familiarized with the skillsets of a programmer. Might want to look at the following books:
The Pragmatic Programmer
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
And oh yeah,Dilbert & The Tao of Programming for philosophical contemplation.
Generalist/Founder with wide range. Spent last 4 years managing a team of 20+ engineers. Currently taking a sabbatical. Interested in modernizing legacy systems and platform engineering. Also willing to take on maintenance work for the right company.