Prezi Engineering’s 2022 In A Nutshell
The way, us, engineers saw it…
We came, we saw, we conquered, said the Romans. But this is not Ancient Rome, it’s Prezi engineering and this is 2022. The world has changed and evolved, and as such, our conclusions got a lot more diverse than come, see, and conquer. In 2022, the only way forward was to try, fail, fail again, fail better, and eventually succeed. Because it’s software and software is iterative.
2022, for me at least, was a year of rapid growth. It didn’t come without its “growing pains” and “teething problems”, but finding myself at the helm of a high-profile, high-priority project where every minute had to be utilised in the best possible way, was definitely not something I’d call routine. Building my leadership skills, all the while juggling multiple frameworks, programming languages and a partner API going through its fair share of maturing are just a few things I consider to have been great opportunities for growth.
Truth is, all of us engineers here in Prezi have something worth recalling from 2022, be that on a purely technical or more personal note, and there’s no better way to illustrate than giving them the stage.
Alexander Köhler — Site Reliability Engineer 👨🔬
Some technologies we have are well-made for the problem space. They were crafted with care and at the time they were created, there was no public alternative available. But they were strictly internal.
As time moved on, the industry created best-of-breed solutions for many things we have. As we rebuilt the SRE team, we came across multiple corners in our platform that are hard to understand and maintain as they are very Prezi-specific. Furthermore, those specific solutions make onboarding new hires very time-consuming, as they cannot benefit from their existing experiences as they should.
It’s not enough to come up with the best solution for a problem. It’s about re-evaluating constantly against best-practices.
So, looking forward, we will make it a habit to recheck the internal solutions we have. And maybe replacing them with best practice solutions. That will help to reduce tech debt and complexity.
Ramon Rangel — Product Manager🕴️
How the hell am I going to be able to optimise tools and technologies for engineers now with more than 100 micro-services, where technologies and platforms change constantly? How to get an engineering snapshot and optimise it?!?
The DX (Developer Experience) team helped me to familiarise myself with the tools and products made at home, the Data team helped me with dashboards where we can analyse the usage and identify the most active users, then schedule interviews with them, where they showed me how they used the tools, as well as the pain points, but what surprised me the most was the desire that engineers have to optimise their tools. They gave me specific ideas of new features which we documented and prioritised, many of them were released, others still in the backlog due to our capacity.
Currently, we are working with SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) to optimise the way logs are handled in the company, and we want to radically change the archaic way of filtering searches, especially with service logs, and replace it with a GUI that allows searching for any real-time event to streamline the troubleshooting
What I learned in 2022 is that work life can be complicated. It is complicated in different ways, but instead of lying down crying, we get up and gradually fix the mess due to the constant deprecation of technologies and technical debt. I am surprised by the desire that engineering has, to continue improving.
Yvette Chica — Software Engineer 👩💻
Back to normality. What is normality? 2022 was a year we tried to get back to what life was before the pandemic-that-shall-not-be-named. For me, this meant travelling more, and as a company, we started more in-person meetings like power week and other staying connected events. A development I appreciated.
But still, things were not like they were before, what with Prezi remaining a hybrid workplace and hiring new colleagues from all around the European continent. Not to mention all the different team and organisational changes we have had in the past year. I joined Prezi just as the pandemic started, and it took me time to get used to remote work, and I think I’ve only just started getting the hang of it. As a company, we are still adapting to this way of working, and I’m curious to see how we will continue to development strategies towards more communication, standardisation, and cohesion.
So, are we getting back to normality? Well, things are not going back to the way they used to be, that’s for sure. But as the situation changes, we adapt and slowly things start to feel normal again. This is how life works, and it’s great.
Wishing everyone a cosy time with their friends & family. And with that, I leave you with these words, which may or may not be comforting:
“All is flux; nothing stays still” — Heraclitus
Misu Szijjártó-Nagy — Software Engineer 👨💻
Good heavens, what a year… Building software and a house at the same time. It’s like sneezing while swallowing your scrambled eggs breakfast. 🤣
Not efficient on either side. Unforeseeable interruptions coming in, random day-off requests going out. Taking on a second job for better financial stability, looking after children, gardening, struggling to achieve my Prezi goals. Thank God it’s over. Feels like I’ll have to check if I have cleaned up all the Horcruxes I split my soul into… 🪄
László Dezsényi — Engineering Manager 👨💼
2022. What a year! If I had to summarise in one sentence, I would say this has been the busiest year since I joined Prezi. Indeed, post pandemic and worldwide financial events made the visual communication market harder to navigate than ever.
We, the native team, had to adjust course a couple of times and that is always challenging. Looking back at the year’s end, however, I can say that despite difficulties, we achieved great things; releasing cool features every 2 weeks like virtual background or meeting widgets. We managed to refurbish our Windows build system, and we got more into Present desktop applications technically. There are only a very few teams in the company with which we had no common projects together.
I’m looking forward to our company-wide winter holiday with the feeling of being proud of, and grateful to my team.
Máté Börcsök — Software Engineer 👨💻
Learn by doing! Some of you may have already read my article about how we introduced ZIO at Prezi. The performance improvement achieved in that service was impressive, and I’m proud of it.
Since that project, I have felt the need to learn it more in-depth. What should I do? If I give myself the task of reading the documentation and the source code, I will get bored and uninterested soon. That’s just how I work. My way is learning by doing.
So I looked at the ecosystem and found a missing spot: ZIO needs a Memcached client. So I wrote one during my sabbatical.
After some discovery, I found the ZIO-Redis project, a different caching solution. So I decided to fork it and transform it into a ZIO-Memcached client. It was a fantastic experience. After running a s/redis/memcached/ on the repository, fixing the errors and changing the protocol got me to a basic working solution in a week (considering free time only).
Then iteratively, I added the missing features, including many tests, the “meta” protocol, an example web service, a fully featured test implementation using STM, and a basic JMH benchmark project. During that journey, I understood most of the features of ZIO. When I returned from my leave, I presented it to my colleagues, inspiring them and initiating improvements in Prezi’s infrastructure.
That was the professional highlight of my year. There’s still some work to be done on the client, but I definitely learned ZIO on the way.
While getting engineers to write, often feels like herding cats, when they do, it’s pure, solid gold, innit? 🤩 From infrastructure, to services, front-end head-scratchers and beta API-induced migraines, we all had our fair share of struggles and successes. I for one, am definitely sporting more grey hair than at the end of 2021, but you know what? It was fun, it was worth it and I am happy to look at 2023 knowing 2022 gave us all a good baseline to build upon in the new year. After all, if engineering isn’t about continuous evolution, I don’t know what is.
At the end of the day, engineer or not, we’re all human. We evolve and so does software. Happy Holidays and a successful New Year to everyone!
P.S. There’s a hidden Prezi easter-egg in the headline, a nod to our decade+ long history. Can you guess what it is…? 😉
