Tag: devops

In Part One of this two-part series, we introduced former SlideShare and LinkedIn software engineer Sylvain Kalache, who shared his career growth within the two companies. In this second part, we’ll look at San Francisco-based The Holberton School of Software Engineering, which Kalache co-founded to better prepare students to work in a DevOps world.

School Founder, Still a Coder

Kalache still uses much the same coding skills in his new role as he did as an engineer. “I still manage machines, the ones that host our website and intranet and the iMacs that students use,” he says.

The Holberton School of Software Engineering founders removed every manual step possible, using software to automate the admissions process and any process that they could. Even in the classroom, automation rules: Computers automatically review student work on projects.

“Computers test that students’ code works as expected by simulating user interaction, checking syntax and assessing how fast the code executes. For infrastructure in code, computers check for stability, response times and security breaches. By using multiple ratings parameters that are linked to specific skills, the computers collect detailed data about the strengths and weaknesses of each student,” says Kalache.

“We have a lot of our own secret sauce in software automation running the school for us,” he adds. “This requires all the technical skills I used in my coding days including designing, building, configuring, testing, deploying and maintaining software and systems.”

Teaching Methods

The Holberton School of Software Engineering engages students in building each skill they will need for careers in software engineering through use of industry-standard teaching methods. “Methods include deep learning in building features into software products and classical teaching in clear, documented code,” Kalache says. “We have a team of 150-plus mentors who make sure our curriculum is up to date and in sync with what the industry actually does and who coach and share their knowledge with students.”

The Holberton School of Software Engineering uses fully practical methods with no formal teachers or lectures, only mentors. “Mentors are like managers in a workplace. I mentor, coaching students in their learning journey and giving advice when there are issues,” he says.

Students engage in peer learning, working collaboratively on software projects, which encompass the skills they will need to demonstrate in their careers. Successful completion of projects, including solo projects, is proof of attaining the required skills. “Students must defend their projects before mentors with mentors ensuring that every student can present and explain the technical aspects of the project; if even one student can’t explain it, then the group fails on that project,” says Kalache.

“We teach problem-solving and how to learn new skills because there will constantly be new technologies and concepts for our students to understand and master in their careers in the tech world,” he adds. “Professionals who cannot adapt and retrain themselves will quickly fall out of date with technology.”

Readying Students for Careers from Day One

The Holberton School of Software Engineering prepares students to be ready to work when they start their careers. “Graduates of other programs whom I have spoken with have no idea what it is to ship code to production and run a production environment. They are used to academic projects that teachers correct for them,” Kalache says. “That is not how it works in the industry.

“Even boot camps and universities provide minimal practical experience that will make job hunting difficult,” he continues. Smaller organizations don’t have the money to pay someone to learn before starting them working in production. Thus, he says, startups need to execute fast using professionals with mature skills. “Though our students will fail and struggle, they will do it at the school, which will have a much smaller impact than doing it on the job,” says Kalache. Students are exposed to creating, shipping and working with code in production for two years before graduation.

What’s more, real, workday DevOps requires effective communications skills. “Whether it is to introduce the last tool you built, explain what happened during an outage or convince your managers that your solution to a problem is the right one, you need to have oral and written communications skills,” says Kalache. As such, the school runs students through a series of exercises in public speaking, technical writing and documentation, as well as post-mortem communications when dissecting an outage, prepping them even further for their careers and the world beyond the classroom.

In 2011, Sylvain Kalache was a software engineer at SlideShare, which LinkedIn acquired in 2012. Kalache was a senior systems reliability engineer (SRE) at LinkedIn, doing project management and planning, documenting and sharing knowledge tools, and adapting himself and his work to the LinkedIn organization and its technology.

Today, Kalache is helping build DevOps careers as co-founder of Holberton School of Software Engineering in San Francisco, where students learn to code through “project-based and peer learning,” according to information from the Holberton School website.

This is Kalache’s DevOps career story, how he worked in and then transitioned from a career in DevOps to a personal and professional investment in helping students to build their DevOps talents toward a lifetime of coding and contribution in software engineering and, hopefully, successful careers.

Software Engineering at SlideShare

“SlideShare was a very small company when I joined. The San Francisco office had only 10 people; I was only the second engineer at that location,” says Kalache. But the DevOps mindset was strong there, he says, and the company had bet everything on DevOps methodologies. In fact, it was the commitment to DevOps by SlideShare and its CTO at the time, Jon Boutelle, from which Kalache learned of the development approach and took to it so quickly.

“Boutelle was looking for full-stack or aspiring full-stack engineers and I was a junior programmer and eager to learn. In a small company like that where you are encouraged to work on every aspect of the product life cycle, it became very clear that I was in charge of taking care of my mistakes,” says Kalache, adding SlideShare expected him to take ownership of his code from design to production.

“Because I was eventually in charge of a lot that was going on with the infrastructure at SlideShare, I had to build and maintain a lot of systems that were serving billions of slide views per month at what was one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world,” says Kalache.

People from the Dev and Ops teams there did not only their own work, but also the work of their companion team. In essence, Dev was both Dev and Ops and, likewise, Ops was both Ops and Dev.

“The SlideShare people were writing their own configuration management code, setting up monitoring of new services and features as they built them, deploying their own code, and troubleshooting code in the production environment,” says Kalache. Ops people helped developers design sound code for acceleration while also giving their code a second look to ensure fitness for operations.

Project Skynet

“The most exciting project I built for SlideShare was Skynet, an automated tool to monitor, scale and auto-heal a system in the cloud,” says Kalache. Skynet was developed to meet several challenges in the day-to-day work of simply being SlideShare and doing what SlideShare does. SlideShare acted on, renamed and translated countless files from one type to another to share them on the site. As with other slide technologies, the tool was a fit for teaching and presentations.

There was no way to know exactly how much users would upload, access or view any slide content at a given time. “There were peaks and valleys in upload traffic with mornings seeing high traffic and low volumes in the evening and on weekends. The SlideShare infrastructure had to scale quickly to encompass and convert common document files at speed. This required adding many hundreds of machines to the infrastructure,” says Kalache, which were virtual  machines that spun up in minutes in the AWS EC2.

One purpose of Skynet was to enable precise analysis of log files for transparency into everything from individual file conversions to changes in the entire machine cluster as the environment scaled up or down. The other purpose of Skynet was to use the analyses to auto-heal; in other words, to restore the cluster back to its initial size once the peaks were over.

With many thousands more employees at LinkedIn than at SlideShare, Kalache left many of his duties at SlideShare to others while he dove much more acutely into specific aspects of his work.

Co-Founding a School That Builds Careers

In speaking with his colleagues and representatives from various enterprises, Kalache continually confirmed that organizations using DevOps are in need of lots of engineers but they can’t find candidates who are knowledgeable and experienced. “I was actually recruiting for SlideShare and for LinkedIn. What saddened me was to see a graduate who had just spent half a decade and a lot of money on a master’s degree only to be far from employable,” he says.

Kalache found it hard to find people who knew basic software engineering, DevOps, and how to be an SRE for LinkedIn. “We instead had to hire early graduates who had coding skills and an interest in operations and train them on being an SRE,” he says.

Kalache decided to combine an awareness of alternative teaching methods with his passion for the coding and ops communities to find a solution to how to better prepare software engineers for careers. “After mulling it over for two years, I decided to quit my job at LinkedIn and create the Holberton School,” says Kalache.

In Part Two, we dive headlong into the teaching and learning experiences at the Holberton School of Software Engineering to help students learn and understand the DevOps methodologies and increase their chances for success in their respective careers.