Noodle Coder

Last Friday, the unicorn startup I work for celebrated surpassing 1 million paying Australian users. Working at a company serving such a large user base requires us to exercise extreme caution with every deployment to our production environment. Of course applying regression test on staging environment and then smoke testing after the deployment on production environment is a must. Even then, sometimes bugs slip through that we didn't catch. Lately, we've started using a strategy called "Canary deployment" to help improve how we roll out updates that mostly about refactoring or lib upgrade and introduce no new feature. For new feature, we always use feature flag to enable the feature for a small group of users, which I'll write in another post. Canary deployment is straightforward. Instead of immediately giving the update to all users, we roll it out gradually in small stages. Initially, we apply the new update to just 10% of our total traffics. If any problems oc...

I was born and raised in Vietnam. Up until now, as I write this article, I still haven't left this 'S-shaped' country with 100 million people. I worked as a part-time software engineer for some local companies from June 2016 to the end of 2017. After that, I secured my first full-time job at a Silicon Valley-based startup which has an office in Ha Noi, where I spent 6 years of my career. At the end of 2023, I decided to leave my job at the startup and find a new opportunity. It's really hard for me to find another job in Ha Noi that can pay me higher than my current rate. So I looked for some foreign software companies or ones located in Ho Chi Minh City that allow remote work. That's when I found this big tech company - an Australian unicorn startup. The interview experience with this company was completely different from my previous ones. In this big tech company, whether you're junior or senior, all candidates always have to go through two online tests. One i...