Randy Shoup

I have been talking to Randy Shoup, consultant and former CTO of KIXEYE, about company culture in the software industry. Shoup previously was Director of Engineering for Google App Engine and, prior to that, Chief Engineer and Distinguished Architect at eBay. This episode can be seen as a sequel to show 208, on the topic of job interviews and hiring in the software industry.

Shoup has spoken frequently on how to build great teams and establish a supportive company culture around them. In… Show more

I have been talking to Randy Shoup, consultant and former CTO of KIXEYE, about company culture in the software industry. Shoup previously was Director of Engineering for Google App Engine and, prior to that, Chief Engineer and Distinguished Architect at eBay. This episode can be seen as a sequel to show 208, on the topic of job interviews and hiring in the software industry.

Shoup has spoken frequently on how to build great teams and establish a supportive company culture around them. In this show, Shoup elaborates on what a healthy company culture looks like, who is responsible for the its development, and how to create high-performing teams. Drawing upon on his experiences working at both large and small, companies, Shoup provides positive and negative examples. In addition, Shoup discusses key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure whether both managers and employees are on track.

Finally we talked about whether multi-national companies can create productive teams where the members are distributed internationally. Show less

I have been interviewing Randy Shoup, former CTO at KIXEYE, on hiring in the software industry. Prior to KIXEYE, Randy worked as director of engineering at Google for the Google App Engine and as chief engineer and distinguished architect at eBay. Randy has spoken on various occasions about how to hire great people for highly productive teams and his own experiences in doing so. In this interview, Randy talked about how companies can find the right candidates, how candidates can get the… Show more

I have been interviewing Randy Shoup, former CTO at KIXEYE, on hiring in the software industry. Prior to KIXEYE, Randy worked as director of engineering at Google for the Google App Engine and as chief engineer and distinguished architect at eBay. Randy has spoken on various occasions about how to hire great people for highly productive teams and his own experiences in doing so. In this interview, Randy talked about how companies can find the right candidates, how candidates can get the attention of the companies they really want to work for, and how interviews and social media can assist in the process. He and I also discussed the notion of always hiring “A-players” and its influence on the teams and on the people who live in an area where only “A-players” get hired. In addition, they talk about the “Google way of hiring” and how to get candidates to come to a second interview even if they failed the first time. Show less

Operating online games is fun and challenging. Games are some of the spikiest workloads around, and real-time really means *real-time*. Randy shares many of the DevOps techniques his team has put into practice at KIXEYE: Cloud infrastructure, Service teams, and DevOps Culture. He talks about elastic workloads, micro-services, configuration automation, and a common service "chassis". He further discusses the organizational and technical disciplines of team autonomy, internal vendor-customer… Show more

Operating online games is fun and challenging. Games are some of the spikiest workloads around, and real-time really means *real-time*. Randy shares many of the DevOps techniques his team has put into practice at KIXEYE: Cloud infrastructure, Service teams, and DevOps Culture. He talks about elastic workloads, micro-services, configuration automation, and a common service "chassis". He further discusses the organizational and technical disciplines of team autonomy, internal vendor-customer relationships, and, of course, "you build it, you run it"! Show less

Randy discusses several important aspects of engineering cultures, which both support and hinder the ability to innovate: hiring and retention, ownership and collaboration, quality and discipline, and learning and experimentation. He offers some learnings about what has worked well -- and what has not -- in creating and sustaining an effective engineering culture. He further offers some concrete suggestions on how other organizations -- both large and small -- can evolve their cultures as well.

Real-time games face many of the same challenges faced -- and solved -- by companies like eBay and Google. They are extremely latency-sensitive, are subject to unpredictable growth and scalability curves, and exhibit extremely spiky load profiles. This session discusses how experiences with large-scale websites like eBay and Google have informed our approach to building, testing, and operating real-time games at KIXEYE.

Real-time games face many of the same challenges faced -- and solved -- by companies like eBay and Google. They are extremely latency-sensitive, are subject to unpredictable growth and scalability curves, and exhibit extremely spiky load profiles. This session discusses how experiences with large-scale websites like eBay and Google have informed our approach to building, testing, and operating real-time games at KIXEYE.

eBay and Google operate some of the largest Internet sites on the planet, and each maintains its leadership through continuous innovation in infrastructure and products. While substantially different in their detailed approaches, both organizations sustain their feature velocity through a combination of technology, people, and process. This presentation explores how these large-scale sites do it, and offers concrete suggestions on how other organizations -- both large and small -- can do the… Show more

eBay and Google operate some of the largest Internet sites on the planet, and each maintains its leadership through continuous innovation in infrastructure and products. While substantially different in their detailed approaches, both organizations sustain their feature velocity through a combination of technology, people, and process. This presentation explores how these large-scale sites do it, and offers concrete suggestions on how other organizations -- both large and small -- can do the same. Show less

Google Cloud Datastore represents Google's multiple years of operating a planet-scale, reliable, and agile NoSQL system in the cloud. With petabytes of storage and serving 4.5 trillion operations every month, it offers schemaless design, transactional consistency, completely predictable performance, and a rich set of query features. This presentation covers the design principles underpinning Cloud Datastore, the operational techniques Google uses to maintain its reliability, and its integration… Show more

Google Cloud Datastore represents Google's multiple years of operating a planet-scale, reliable, and agile NoSQL system in the cloud. With petabytes of storage and serving 4.5 trillion operations every month, it offers schemaless design, transactional consistency, completely predictable performance, and a rich set of query features. This presentation covers the design principles underpinning Cloud Datastore, the operational techniques Google uses to maintain its reliability, and its integration with the rest of the Google Cloud Platform. This session also offers thoughts on consistency models applicable to any large-scale, multi-data-center storage deployment. Show less

eBay Chief Engineer Randy Shoup's keynote at QCon 2010 outlines several critical elements of the evolving cloud programming model – what developers need to do to develop successful systems in the cloud. It discusses state management and statelessness, distribution- and network-awareness, workload partitioning, cost and resource metering, automation readiness, and deployment strategies.

Five best practices from eBay Distinguished Architect Randy Shoup:
(1) Partitioning
(2) Asynchrony
(3) Automation
(4) Failure Tolerance
(5) Eventual Consistency.