The Engineering Platform workforce at Grammarly, whereas technically targeted, can be concerned within the onboarding course of for brand spanking new workforce members. That comes from the workforce’s focus: to empower each engineer to simply construct, develop, and keep any Grammarly product providing utilizing the Platform toolset. Naturally, the earlier engineers learn about that toolset, the earlier they’ll use it to have extra possession and autonomy all through the event cycle.
The Engineering Platform workforce created the Platform College undertaking, our academic program for brand spanking new hires firstly of their Grammarly journey. This undertaking offers guides and tutorials that we develop and curate. It helps anybody at Grammarly rapidly study the fundamentals of the third-party providers and cloud internet hosting we use and the tooling we’ve created for various infrastructure duties.
With our remote-first hybrid working mannequin, the tutorial assets in Platform College assist engineers resolve issues rapidly with out relying on different groups—which additionally restores time that Platform on-call engineers may need in any other case spent answering questions in Slack!
Why we created Platform College
The number of providers the Engineering Platform workforce offers is broad and consists of many homegrown instruments. Some examples are:
- A custom-built logs and metrics aggregation system that enables us to ingest observability information from thousands and thousands of Grammarly functions
- CI/CD infrastructure that runs 1000’s of pipelines to help the supply of our back-end and front-end providers
- Automation providers used to create cloud accounts pre-filled with all wanted assets
- Slack bots and functions that ease info sharing about community topology all through the group
- Templating instruments for quick and predictable bootstrapping of the brand new environments wanted to develop and host a brand new service
- CLI instruments used regionally and in CI/CD to handle and deploy back-end providers
Along with the above, we use a number of SaaS and self-hosted software program merchandise and infrastructure administration instruments. The Engineering Platform workforce creates abstractions round these instruments to scale back the workload that might be required from different engineering groups to develop and keep the underlying providers.
It’s no shock that, with a fast-growing engineering group, lately we started to obtain an increasing number of questions in our Engineering Platform workforce Slack channel, the place we offer on-call help. Someday in 2020, the thought to create a self-service instructional platform was born.
We did in-depth analysis and requested engineers to finish a survey to know what info they wanted and the way they’d prefer to obtain it. In response, we created Platform College and launched it in March 2021.
Platform College is a set of on-line tutorials that offers important data about utilizing our Platform choices, automation, and administration instruments. With each written tutorials and video lectures, we cowl numerous subjects, similar to utilizing our infrastructure, sustaining deployed functions, and organising observability.
Certainly one of our foremost targets was to save lots of engineers from having to look via all kinds of documentation. Although diving into the supply documentation is unavoidable ultimately, Platform College offers a strong basis. Every part you’ll want to learn about improvement instruments and providers at Grammarly is in a single place and specified by a collection of clear steps. As soon as engineers get the fundamentals, additional looking out and documentation skimming turns into simpler and extra productive.
What Platform College teaches
This system progressively leads engineers from a Day 0 state, with an empty surroundings, to a Day 2 state, the place infrastructure is prepared, the applying is deployed, and observability instruments are arrange.
Platform College is designed to reply questions associated to:
- Deploying code: We educate engineers on every thing from designing the infrastructure to organising ECS (Elastic Container Service) clusters, load balancers, and activity definitions utilizing Terraform.
- Monitoring: We clarify tips on how to use our log administration system and discover utility and system logs. There are tutorials for monitoring time-series metrics and organising alerts too.
- Connecting to different providers: We present tips on how to arrange identification and entry administration in your providers and the way community communication is organized in AWS.
Our tutorials clarify tips on how to use cloud providers or infrastructure administration instruments to handle cloud assets. Much more importantly, we discover tips on how to use all of the instruments and merchandise collectively in several use circumstances and eventualities.
Typically, engineers study finest via apply and experimentation. So we even have a particular surroundings the place engineers can apply. It’s a form of sandbox the place they’ll create, break, and examine issues with out harming improvement or manufacturing environments.
How did we resolve what engineers must know?
After doing a variety of analysis and interviewing our colleagues, we developed a “consumer journey” visualizing each step an engineer must undergo to deploy their undertaking and make it manufacturing prepared. Alongside the best way, we famous ache factors and open questions.
With this info in hand, we selected the subjects for tutorials. And the visible illustration helped us compose these tutorials into a whole consumer journey or mini-project, the place each tutorial is a chunk of the larger image.
Another excuse for spending a while constructing a consumer journey is to get an correct illustration of issues that may or ought to be automated. By figuring out ache factors, this map has additionally helped us construct self-service options for different groups. For instance, organising and configuring CI runners for log storage is now automated as a result of these have been time-consuming duties for customers in addition to for the Engineering Platform workforce.
What do the tutorials appear like?
Writing instructional tutorials is a problem. And there’s no “one measurement suits all” method to making a tutorial that everybody will get pleasure from. Our method was to make the teachings easygoing but difficult, whereas making certain that every tutorial had a transparent end result.
The tutorials add as much as a narrative, which offers a sense of engaged on a complete undertaking slightly than fragmented items. But when an engineer must dive deep into a specific subject, we additionally present a extra detailed set of documentation grouped by service or device.
Each tutorial has its personal studying objective, an outlined set of stipulations, and a listing of the subsequent steps. This helps hold the consumer in context each time they begin or end a tutorial.
We offer code snippets and diagrams to elucidate the important elements, however we don’t copy and paste textual content from the documentation of concerned providers (our personal or a 3rd occasion’s). As an alternative, we offer hyperlinks to the docs in order to not overload the tutorials with explanations.
Following the KISS precept, we use fundamental headers, 2–3 sentence paragraphs, and a minimal of coloured/styled textual content.
The outcomes
In a nutshell, Platform College contributes to a “you construct it, you personal it” method the place builders have broad operational duties and management.
In fact, engineers shouldn’t must know each element about infrastructure or instruments to personal what they construct. The Engineering Platform workforce at Grammarly is answerable for abstracting many instruments and options within the cloud into an easy-to-use set of automation and utilities in order that engineers can keep targeted on constructing.
With the tutorial assets provided via the Platform College program, engineering groups profit within the following methods:
- Earlier than any code is deployed, having some background on our methods helps engineers design a extra dependable answer from the beginning.
- After code is deployed, code house owners are outfitted to deal with lots of their very own infrastructure wants, similar to monitoring and scaling. That is useful as a result of the code proprietor is the one that will finest perceive their undertaking’s distinctive wants and necessities.
- Engineers are ready to answer incidents a lot quicker—if you know the way one thing works, you’re significantly better at troubleshooting it.
- Engineering groups get extra autonomy and have much less dependence on different groups, so we are able to launch new tasks and options extra rapidly.
A further advantage of the Platform College program is that it frees the Engineering Platform workforce from describing the identical subject a number of instances for various groups, giving us the chance to deal with creating extra developer productiveness instruments!
Trying ahead
We at the moment embrace Platform College as a compulsory onboarding activity for brand spanking new engineers. They don’t must learn all of the content material, however they do must view two 20-minute video displays that describe crucial issues they’ll must know. Later, they’ll take the self-paced tutorials and study intimately in regards to the issues they watched within the movies.
Consequently, we’ve considerably lowered the variety of repetitive and related questions the Engineering Platform workforce receives. As a result of engineers could be extra proactive and environment friendly, we get virtually no questions in regards to the subjects coated in Platform College.
We’re consistently monitoring feedback and suggestions on the tutorials. Each half yr, we ship out one other survey of engineering questions and help wants. We use the outcomes to make vital updates to Platform College and different inside choices offered by the Engineering Platform workforce. Whereas sustaining our current tutorials, we proceed investing in new automation instruments to assist engineers construct software program and providers quicker than ever.
We additionally wish to discover and experiment with new methods of training. Throughout Grammarly’s newest Hack Week, we labored on a undertaking that presents Platform College subjects within the type of an old-school text-based journey recreation performed within the terminal. This undertaking continues to be in improvement, however we imagine it might convey some enjoyable to the training course of.
Do the values described on this submit resonate with you? Grammarly’s Engineering workforce is rising and hiring—and also you may quickly be taking the Platform College course your self should you apply for a task [here].
