Daily deploys, pair programming and who we hire at KMK

During the SARCCOM meetup that was held at KMK, our VP of Engineering Tommy Sullivan gave a 5 minute summary on how we do daily deploys at KMK — which you can catch in the video below that I have set to the start of the conversation.

From a tooling standpoint a lot of the automation he talks about is driven via Jenkins and Ansible. From an infrastructure standpoint we leverage image builds and autoscaling groups (AWS) or regional managed instance groups (GCP). Our ops engineer Ridho gave a really good tech talk on our internal tooling to achieve this that you can watch here. (Note: It’s in Bahasa Indonesia).

He also touched on ping-pong pairing. For those who are unfamiliar with what that is, this short promotional video from Upcase does a good job as an example. We should make our own version of this video :). At KMK we see pair programming and the discussions that it facilitates between developers as a key component of being able to get constant feedback on our work and ensure the quality of our code is high. This also reduces the time required on code reviews which we do only when teams are collaborating between offices.

Due to our culture of constant and open feedback, we put a high premium on engineers ability to collaborate and work in teams. There have been times where we pass on a technically strong candidate due to a lack of cultural fit. Conversely, because we have a clear method of on-boarding engineers and practices such as pair-programming we are happy to “ramp-up” younger engineers who have the raw technical capabilities and right attitude to make them into solid 10x engineers. Tommy explains this in the segment below.

There are many other daily practices that are key to how we realise our engineering culture at KMK. If this sounds like the type of environment you would be excited to work in head over to our careers page and apply for one of our many open positions today.