Category: Software Engineering

I’ve been lucky enough not to be laid off yet, and have been plunged headfirst in working from home. Before this pandemic I avoided working from home because I got distracted pretty easily and found it easier to get work done in the office. I’ve typically been a high performer and like to maintain work life balance so falling behind because I worked from home is not an option. 

Now I’ve been required to work from home since early march. The first couple weeks were rough. Working in a new setting, big changes going on in the world, combined to make focus difficult. I fell behind where I wanted to be on several projects. It was all dragging me down.

Late last week, at the time of writing, I made two big changes which seem to be helping a lot. They are getting better sleep and using the Pomodoro technique to focus on work. 

To get better sleep, all I did was start closing my blinds in the evening. I live downtown, so at night there are lots of light shining into my nice large windows. The view is good, but the light degrades sleep quality. I noticed a big difference the first night and have been feeling consistently good this last week.

My version of the Pomodoro technique is to do 40minute ‘sprints’ of focused coding time. This gets me past the initial hump and doing solid work. Then I take a short break and circle back for another round of focused work. This is similar to what I would do in the office, work for a while, then chat with coworkers or go to the lunch room. Except now I just stay in my apartment and stretch or workout. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

Working from home is still a bit rough. But I think I’m past the hump of adapting to it. Now I just want to optimize a few things like my monitors and getting a motorized standing desk. 

Business Intelligence is the process of exposing the results of customer workflows in an easy to consume fashion for Business Analysts, Accountants and Executives. 

When your product is software that your customers’ use, it can be hard to know how customers are using it in the large. For BI you log whatever the customer did in a format that is easy to query via SQL. For purchasing flow you log.

{
    "customerId": "ABC",
    "itemId": 1234,
    "time": "12:34 AM",
    "price": "$13.87",
    ……
    "sessionId": 987
}

Then analysts can figure out usage patterns, discover and fix bad customer experiences and generally figure out what customers are doing. 

How is this different from normal logging? 

Programmers care about exceptions, lines of code and values of variables. The business cares where the customer was in the workflow, what did the customer click on, what happened after that. If there was a silent retry that the customer didn’t notice the business analysts don’t care. 

They care about what customers are doing and how the software responds more so than what the software is doing. 

BI logging is typically preserved durably over at least months and needs to adhere to a schema that makes aggregating data together easy later on. This can be achieved with normal structured logging or by adding a separate code flow just for ‘Business’ logs. 

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