Job Categories

• Things that move containers (EKB, SACO, ANCOTRANS, ECU, OI, FreightGate, TFG)
• Things that move cargo (SACO, Gruber)
• Things that pack/unpack things (P&B)
• Things that deal with documents (Porath, Dakosy, SACO, FreightGate)
• Things that hold containers (DAKOSY)

EKB

• Trucks. Mostly in DE
• They send us a representation of the DB records for that shipment after each change in their system
• Super nice people.
• They write everything in Spring Boot.
• lorenz-cgo tells Lorenz about cgo detections so he can manually try and determine if there will be a delay.

Porath

• Send us semicolon delimited representations of ATLAS messages
• ATLAS is just Zoll
• Also send us ;messages; in other countries with XML tags written in that nation. For example, we have German and Dutch XML tags.
• Usually instant; messages sometimes delayed by weeks.
• Porath Bot tells ops about customs
• None of this maps to transport plan
• Limited tech resources on their end.

SACO

• They have boats that move containers
• They have small trucks that move cargo (not containers)
• They send us WWA Member Shipment XML
  • Most of that isn't related to transport plan

Prahl & Barso

• They pack and unpack containers
• We mostly care about telling ops when they announce an ATB number so they can do customs
  • There's no transport plan events for this
• Prahl & Barso bot pings the ops manager working on that shipment when their website shows the data
  • We scrape it every half hour, they don't have an API
    • They outsource their technology to some other company that occasionally goes offline

Ocean Insights

• Tells us where containers are (really just about the part on a boat or close-to-it, they don't tell us about trucks or whatever)
• Tricky weird logic about MBLs, Booking Numbers, and container numbers
• Our TMS doesn't really provide the information we need to subscribe to things
• Almost exactly a 1:1 mapping with TransportPlan, except rollovers or delays that happen at port-of-call.
• Rollover Bot (Adele Bot) notifies ops about rollovers

Dakosy

• Port of Hamburg (also Wilhelmshaven and  Bremerhaven)
• Tells us what a container is doing at the port
• We can subscribe to updates about a container
• We can tell the port what to do with a container (but we don't)
• We can lock-out important partners like ECU from knowing what the status of our containers are if we subscribe to them first.
• The entire thing is XML SFTP uploads/downloads
• We only integrate with Dakosy "IMP". There's no such thing as Dakosy "EXP". You can get export information with other Dakosy products but they are not called "EXP".

TFG

• They're trains
  • Some people refuse to admit they have trucks, but they do.
• They send us XML that looks like SOAP but is actually a key-value lookup powered by request bodies matching a value in MySql.
• They don't tell us estimates
• We can book with them via API, but we don't.

FreightGate

• Our WNL agents in Asia use this to provide us details about shipments
  • Because a lot of email conversations take place and data is often missing in emails
• Pushes updates to TMS
• Cross-region concerns. Data leaving the region is prone to a lot of failure.
• Updates actual values of the shipment object
• Sends some transport planning commands

Ancotrans

• REST-like API
  • Also: Doesn't identify purpose of a stop, only that a stop happened
• Doesn't provide GPS
• Seems to be the same API their actual website uses
• Undergoing rebuild on their side. Talk to them in 2019.

Common Needs

• Transports
  • Queues (SQS)
  • HTTP/REST
  • FTP
  • WEB*
• Serialisations
  • XML
  • JSON
  • Weird stuff
  • Web*
• Data States
  • Present-Representation
  • Events

• Custom Applications
  • Loopback
• Outbound
  • TP
  • Activity Feed
  • Slack
  • Logs
  • StatsD
  • DataWarehouse
• Data-Correlation 
  • A total mess
  • Only trust container IDs

Transports

seriously dudes, it doesn't matter.

Except for web. Web is awful.

Serialisations

• XML parsing sillyness
• JSON parsing sillyness
• Expect weird stuff
• Web is horrible. Web is not HTML.

Data States

• When you get events
  • Store events
  • Act on events
• When you have an entity representation
  • Store all data snapshots
  • Compute diffs to detect events
  • Act on events
• Computing diffs is actually better if the data source is not event-driven in nature.

Loopback

Data Correlation

Outbound

• TP
• Activity Feed
• Slack
• Logs
• StatsD
• DataWarehouse

We lack a general aggregation gateway

Development Strategy

• Build people; not software
• Build context; not documents
• Build value; not lines of code
• Fix root causes; not symptoms

People

• Software is not written by smart people
• Software is written by habits and reflexes of people
• Build workout routines

High Context

• Everyone knows the business
• Everyone sees how code impacts the "real world"
• Opportunities and innovation surface
• Can work for the betterment of the company without being given a task
• Higher buy-in and sense of ownership

Low Context

• Teams instructed to do exactly one thing as defined in a ticket
• Blocked I/O tasks go up the stack and wait

Value

• Activity is not productivity
• Value is not shipped code
• Value is money
• Value can be extracted from an investment
• Debt can be useful or destructive

Fixing Symptoms

• The site is down.
• Turn it back on.
• The site is down.
• Turn it back on.
• The site is down.
• Turn it back on.
• Death by 1000 papercuts.

Root Causes

• The site is down.
• What situations existed that it was able to go down?
• Let's be sure to fix that.

The Numbers

PR Review: Time Open

Files Modified (per person average)

LOC Added (per person average)

PRs Created 2018 (total per person)

Contribution Times 2018