News From The Robots (CTO Updates #5)

I have created a forbidden glossary for Bureau Works. Nobody follows me, but I tried, it is my faint attempt to make the Internet and our work spaces better - please remember in the future, you saw it here first.The List goes like this:

1. Circle back - instead, just use “Let’s talk about this on another occasion”.
2. Put a pin on it - seriously.
3. Loop in - “I will include Mary and Josephine in this conversation”.
4. Touch base - in today’s World, sounds borderline pornographic to me.
5. Sign off - might as well use “peace out, y’all”, it would have the same effect.
6. Nuance - ahhh.. the crown jewel, the mother of all forbidden words. If I had a penny for every time I heard this ill-conceived, Satan-crafted word, I would be called Henrique Gates Bezos Zuckerberg Buffet de Orleans Cabral.

#1 Replica DBs

We’ve been using a multi-tiered DB architecture for a while now, with a simple master and replica scheme for our main database. However, the Replicas were only used for analytics and backups, so we had A LOT of idling going on in these servers. So our Master, unfortunately, at times…As part of our improvements that we’ve been talking about in these updates, we started transitioning our code base to read from Replicas, especially heavier queries. The fun part is that instead of doing it on a database level, forcing specific models binding to a specific database, we created annotations that allow us to do so as part of a method in the application, so we can perform MANY readonly operations at once, across different entities. We will dig deeper into this feature in a future engineering post. ;) But this is what our architecture looks like from a bird’s eye perspective:

#2 Other Relevant News

• Daily updates for USD/BRL and EUR/USD exchange rates - better reports, more accuracy, predictable outcomes.
• Performance updates in the Term Base Management module.
• Still in Term Base, flagged terms are now shown in a person’s dashboard as a pending task.
• Stability and performance updates in Accounting, Project Management.
• Many other updates and developments that I didn’t even share with my mom yet! =)

Topics: Insider, Technology

Written by Henrique Cabral

Henrique is a partner at Bureau Works as well as the CTO. He also speaks code and loves racing cars.