apidays LIVE Hong Kong 2021 - API Ecosystem & Data Interchange August 25 & 26, 2021 Shifting out of triage mode with a failing API Rob Dickinson, CTO and Co-founder of Resurface Labs Inc.

1. Because turnarounds
can actually be fun
Shifting out of
triage mode with
a failing API

2. 2
Hello!
I am Rob Dickinson
CTO at Resurface Labs
@robfromboulder rob@resurface.io

3. The challenge
Coping strategies
Best practices
Q&A
Agenda

4. What developers like most
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 Starting from scratch is a lot of fun!

5. What if you aren’t there from the start?
• New employer
• New team assignment
• Promotion
• Acquisition or merger
• Vendor changes
• Directional or strategic changes
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 This happens more often than starting from scratch

6. Sometimes it’s obvious that things are bad
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7. Signs that a turnaround is needed
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• Customers are used for QA
• High rate of defects & regressions
• Random or unfixable behaviors
• Excessive complexity
• Bad or variable performance
• No repeatable processes
• Unstable builds, operational issues
• Failed migrations / upgrades
 Systemic, beyond normal tech debt!

8. Triage mode is bad and feels bad
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9. It’s easy to thrash…
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10. 💣 Ways to blow up a turnaround
• Lack of clear goals & metrics
• Incorrect assumptions about
customers & use-cases
• Culture of being defensive or
blaming original contributors
• Excessive bargaining & politics
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• Switching between languages,
stacks, platforms
• Chasing “resume tech”
• Refactoring as way to
“learn the codebase”
• Rethinking/changing everything
• Incomplete time, resources,
expertise, committment

11. Improving culture & vibe
• Document all the things
• Fill monitoring & logging gaps
• Rely on real customer patterns
• Incentivize smallest changes
that have biggest impact
• Focus on what works well 🤩
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12. Improving tech stack
• Sharpen your tools
• CI/CD gaps?
• Test automation gaps?
• Deploy automation gaps?
• Production runbook?
• Clone your environment
• Chaos testing against clones
• Benchmarking with clones
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13. Don’t forget about security
• Poor security often tags along
with other problems
• Start security scans/reviews
with new foundation
• Security scanning in production
• Security champions program
13

14. Turnarounds can be fun!
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15. 15
Thank you!
Any Questions?
You can reach me after this talk:
@robfromboulder rob@resurface.io