Welcome to Synq.fm's R&D team's getting started guide. This document describes our development philosophy and outlines things we care about as a team.

Our Mission

To deliver business value quickly and iteratively

Doing it right with Core Behaviors

If you are on the Synq Engineering team you already exhibit some (or all) of these behaviors, but if you don't exhibit all, don't worry. We understand some of these behaviors rely on a bridge of trust, and we're happy to build that with you.

• Psychological Safety - It starts here; without Psychological Safety we cannot Communicate and we cannot Care. These are some examples of creating a psychologically safe team, everyone must be responsible and exhibit these behaviors at Synq. Some examples:

  • Encourage team mate participation.
  • Engage and investigate all ideas equally.
  • Define problems collectively as a group.
  • Make sure everyone has a chance to participate.
  • No blame, succeed or fail together mentality.
  • Willingness to try without fear.
  • For more details and examples read here

• Communication - Communication can take many forms, but it is important that we are always communicating at Synq. Without communication, none of this is possible. The only clause here is that we don't want to be jerks; if you are feeling upset please take time to construct your narrative before sharing it (see psychological safety). Some examples:

  • Creating PRs.
  • Writing documentation.
  • Communicating in person or online.
  • Giving and receiving feedback constructively and in real time

• Care about... - If you don't care about Synq, about your craft, about engineering, or about your coworkers, working here will be tough. You don't have to care about everything, but caring about something is important. Without caring you wouldn't be motivated to do the work that's required of you here. Some examples:

  • Care about Synq.
  • Care about your coworkers and their success.
  • Care about standards or quality.
  • Care about the craftsmanship of your work.
  • Care about learning and growing your skills.

If you retain anything from this article, it is the 3 core behaviors from above. We live by this, we hire by this, we fire by this. You can review past hiring/firing decisions here.

How and why we do it

Here are things we specifically do to help achieve our mission

Code

What	Reasoning	Tooling
(Near) Atomic Changes	Pushing smaller changes allows us to deliver incremental value; also reduces chance of breakage	GitHub
High code coverage	CI is useless without good quality coverage, and we can't ship to production confidently without it	CircleCI, Coveralls
Refactor constantly	Code debt slows us down and counters our fast PR turnaround	GitHub

Docs

What	Reasoning	Tooling
Branches and PRs	introduce small changes safely, ensure the code fits our philosophy, knowledge sharing	GitHub, Slack
Effective documentation	moving quickly means we work on a lot of different things, coming back to it later or having another teammmate look at it, they need to know	GitHub Markdown, StackOverflow, Stoplight
Aligned Development	Make sure what we're working on brings business value	Trello, GitHub

DevOps

What	Reasoning	Tooling
Tight CI/CD	The way we can ship the code quickly and confidently	GithHub, CircleCI, Nanobox + Digital Ocean or Heroku
Automated System/UI Testing	Once code is in production, is it really working? Running things like Runscope against the API gives us confidence that new changes didn't mess up prod	CircleCI, Runscope
DevOps Culture	Everyone should know how stuff runs and keep an eye that services are working as expected	Slack, Runscope

Technology Overview

Architecture Diagram

Core Services

Name	Build	Code Coverage	Description	Maintainer(s)	Wiki Link
Akka			API Core	Fiona, Chris	here
Wraith			Programmable Webhooks	Fiona, Mario	here
Unicorn			Upload API producing s3 signed urls	Chris, Jessica	here
Hydra			Transcode jobs service	Jessica, Fiona	here
Pixie			Videojs player service	Jessica, Mario	here
Mizuchi			Media Metadata parser	Mario, Fiona	here

Processing Services

Name	Build	Code Coverage	Description	Maintainer(s)	Wiki Link
Incubus			Lambda Importer	Jessica, Chris	here
Ikiryo			Lambda Importer	Chris, Jessica	here
Serpent			Search Service	Mario	here
Scylla			(S)FTP Transfer Service	Chris	here

Frontend

Name	Build	Code Coverage	Description	Maintainer(s)	Wiki Link
Duwende			ReactJS based Dashboard for SYNQ	Fiona, Mario	here

Shared Services

Name	Build	Code Coverage	Description	Maintainer(s)	Wiki Link
Imp	N/A	N/A	DNS, Ansible	Bruce, Jessica	here
Golang SDK			Shared Golang libraries	Jessica

Repo naming scheme is based on legendary creatures, ideally matching the first (or more) letter(s) of the service "Search -> Serpent"

Resources

Technologies to Explore - if you read something cool, put it here
Useful Links
General Wiki