November 2017 – Solutions by Raymond

effective support engineer

For the last 2 months I’ve been in charge of our production support. If there is a bug or something needs investigation, a ticket is created to start this work. We have websites, web services and windows services to manage all these products. We are a .NET shop but also run linux servers. To be an effective support engineer, you have to familiar with your codebase. Some will say that you have to be an expert. The more familiar you are with your code, the easier it becomes to resolve issues.

How to become a project expert?

It is going to be very difficult to become an expert without having spent enough time on a given project. One way to become a project expert is to be familiar with the code. You have to be familiar with the architecture and how the project is structured. First step is to add new features to the project. By adding new features, you will understand the project better than if you start by working on bugs. Pair programming is another way to gain project knowledge. Ask other developers for help. During this knowledge transfer session, take notes and share it with other developers. The next time you receive a bug or ticket on this project, you will be in a better position to resolve it in a timely manner.

Take notes

On many occasions, I receive the same ticket within months and I had to spend hours doing the same research. This is because I didn’t take any notes when I received the original ticket. That’s why it is very important to take notes. When I start my research, I take notes as I look in the code or sql query. Sometimes I use notepad++ to take simple notes like text. For more detailed notes, I use Microsoft Word and take pictures. These pictures get annotated so we can focus on a specific area. No matter what program you use, take notes and share them with your team.

Transfer Knowledge

Just imagine keeping this knowledge to yourself. The internet was invented to share documents with other people. The same concept applies to support engineers. We have to share this information with other developers. Sharepoint or Confluence are tools that help software teams share important information. During pair programming sessions, take the time to share project architecture and any potential areas where the software can be made better.

When you take the role of a support engineer, you have to be familiar with the project. As you work on bugs, take notes so this knowledge gets share with other developers. Wikis are essential to transfer knowledge. Having a central place where information is shared will pay off dividends in the long run.

3 Things I learned During Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest is a month long initiative to promote collaboration using Github. DigitalOcean created this event a few years back. This year I decided to participate in this event. In this post I want to share the 3 things I learned during Hacktoberfest.

Learn something new

During our busy schedules at work, we’re focused on maintaining existing products. In many occasions, these products are using old technology. We have a very small web site running ASP.NET MVC 2. MVC 2 was released on March 2010 so this web site is using old technology that is 7 years old. We tried to upgrade this website to run a more recent version but we ran into migration issues and the effort was abandoned. Since this site is not a critical product in our company, we decided not to spent more time on it.

With the recent release of .NET Core 2, it’s very important that .NET developers stay on top of these changes. Last month I created a new project in github called DotNetDeployments. This project was created to automate .NET deployments. No more copy and paste files between servers. In order for me to learn something new, I decided to base this project on .NET Core 2. Core 2 was released on August 2017 and there are major changes in relationship to previous versions. In addition to learning .NET Core 2, I also learned DynamoDB high level operations using the AWS SDK.

Solve your own problems

Before Hacktoberfest took place, I started brainstorming ideas for a new project. I wrote down some ideas but I was not happy with those projects. I wanted to solve bigger problems. I’ve worked in different industries and companies and there is always areas to improve. In my current position, we are using Jenkins for our continuous integration server and powershell scripts to deploy our applications. With this setup, we are able to deploy 95% of our projects. The other 5% are deployed by copy and paste. It is not fun. So I decided to create a new project to solve this problem. DotNetDeployments will handle our deployments using AWS CodeDeploy and powershell will be use to create IIS sites, and create Windows Services. The beauty of this project is that it can handle on-premises servers and also AWS EC2 instances. Since this is an open source project, I’m expecting the community to get involved and make this project even better.

People are willing to help

After creating DotNetDeployments, I created github issues to keep track of all things I wanted to accomplish. I added “hacktoberfest” and “help wanted” labels to my issues so I can communicate with the community that I needed help. It didn’t take long and I was receiving small pull requests. I was so excited that developers were willing to help a new project. I reviewed the code and was able to accept those pull requests. After the first pull requests, I decided to add AppVeyor to handle my automated builds. AppVeyor is really easy to use and their documentation is awesome. Now with CI in place, I created more issues to handle unit tests, and also to rearrange the folder structure. I received more pull requests and was happy to review and accept them. Some of these changes broke the build but I merged those changes since I had a different issue to update AppVeyor config file. These changes were necessary because our folder structure changed. I just want to thank all the contributors that are taking the time to make this project better. We’re not done yet but during Hacktoberfest we made a lot of progress.

In summary, Hacktoberfest was a very successful initiative by DigitalOcean and GitHub. During this month, I was able to learn new technologies and solve real problems that developers face every day. DotNetDeployments could not be possible without the help of the community. Thanks to all contributors.