Chiat Koh is Inter.link’s Tech Lead CI/CD & Systems and in this article he explains what a typical day is like in his role, along with sharing some of the keys to success.
As Tech Lead CI/CD & Systems, what does your day look like?
I usually start the day by having a look at the monitoring channels to see if there’s anything urgent that needs taking care of. I find that spending a bit of time with alerts helps me understand our failure modes, and also helps me prioritize required bug fixes and whatnot.
Then, I might spend some time to focus on infrastructure tasks. These could be ensuring that critical upgrades, migration work, or other improvements are planned for and added into our sprints.
Finally, I spend some time contributing to backend systems. I find this hands-on development work really useful to stay up to date with our development workflow and also help me propose or implement improvements.
What is your favourite task?
Occasionally, I like a good troubleshooting problem. They usually involve some detective work, and can be really satisfying when you get to the bottom of it. The process also always teaches me something that I didn’t know before. But I also have to say in this case you definitely can have too much of a good thing.
What advice would you give to someone entering tech?
Learn how to ask questions. While there is tremendous value in being an independent learner, asking questions from more experienced folks can yield insightful answers that cannot be easily found in official documentation.
What is one thing that has changed since you started working in tech?
Infrastructure has never been more accessible than ever. In the past, building infrastructure required plenty of bespoke solutions. You might have physical servers that have differing characteristics depending on when they were installed, or specific scripts for deploying specific applications.
Today, you can easily deploy, run, and monitor full-fledged applications without having to directly manage any infrastructure. While this has enabled developers to be more autonomous, it also forces them to work closer and understand more about infrastructure.
In Inter.link, we are always reviewing our inventory and thinking of ways to use off-the-shelf tools that can accelerate our development velocity. Not only do they free up engineering resources, these standardized tools means that it is likely that our engineers are familiar with them and are able to hit the ground running.
What is one thing most people don’t know about CI/CD?
Accepting and allowing a margin of error in your software can really speed up your development velocity.
Many people believe the goal of CI/CD is to achieve 100% perfection before releasing. Unfortunately, this usually translates to heavier processes such as more extensive Quality Assurance or additional checks that further slow down pipelines.
Finding a good balance usually means trading away some of these burdensome checks and accepting that some minor issues might slip through into production. By removing heavy processes, we allow new features to be pushed out at a much faster rate.
Google has also popularized the idea of Error Budgets — a concrete measurement that can help teams work with the business to balance the need for high reliability against the demand for rapid innovation.
The culture at Inter.link accepts that everyone will make mistakes. This mindset gives the engineering team a necessary degree of freedom and helps us maintain a healthy development velocity.
