Tung Nguyen, VP Engineering at Bleacher Report on AWS, traffic benchmarking, and the Lebron decision

Summary: Tung Nguyen (Twitter tongueroo | Github tongueroo ) is an elite software engineer who as first technical hire at Bleacher Report, led and executed a technology roadmap supporting the company’s growth from an obscure sports blog to one of the world’s most popular sport news sites today. He has a tremendous amount of experience using cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a wide skill set in using open source tools to quickly scale. We covered everything from how “Lebron Decision” presented a major technical challenge, how bad 90s electronic music set a precedent for focusing in a noisy environment, how to get things done working from home with four daughters, how important mentors are in shaping your career, morning habits that power you to get things done, why Richard Branson wasted his time in a hot air balloon instead of witnessing the birth of his child, and so much more. Enjoy the full podcast to immerse yourself into a well rounded discussion on how to architect your stack for massive scalability, home balance, nutrition, and the future of software engineering. If you’re looking for a quick hit, skip to this highlights: How humble beginnings helped Tung to achieve so much more 13:00 How a 9 month hard knock job got his foot into the big league 14:00 First experience coding 16:00 First day and first hire at Bleacher Report 20:00 How to make the a career decision and transition 24:00 Expanding B/R at scale 25:00 Solving engineering challenges caused by the “Janet Jackson Halftime,” Super Bowl power out,” and “Lebron decision” 26:00 Mitigating risks by benchmarking traffic 30:00 Testing on production on a static S3 site vs staging 31:00 Finding and addresses bottlenecks 35:00 Architecting for 4 billion push notifications 36:00 Tools and technologies including Redis, MemcacheD, Rub, Node.js, Amazon Web Services and much more 37:00 On the challenges for building a cloud agnostic platform 38:00 Must have services on Amazon Web Services 40:00 Naming conventions and policies for building 45:00 Handling failure: learning from success vs failing fast 47:00 Handling the NFL crash with a slow query 48:00 Brutal honesty and doing better 50:00 Team building also involves after hours relationship building 51:00 When engineers speaking to end users make sense 53:00 Goal setting and payscale 55:00 Lessons learned from terminating staff 56:00 Will microservices solve all of your problems? 59:00 Creating an environment to get stuff done 1:04 The dark side of coding: dealing with constant change 1:08 Impact of old age: how to keep up as you get older in your career 1:09 Favorite books 1:11 Eliminating distraction and reigning in the focus 1:13 How a house of four daughters influences music choices 1:14 Office vs home environment to get things done (home with 4 daughters!) 1:17 Importance of mentors and the how to build a skill set with them 1:20 Is waking up at 5:00 a game changer in getting things done? 1:23 Balancing nutrition and sleep to perform better in software engineering 1:27 Making time time for kids 1:34 Effect of hacking elementary English by learning characters by site vs phonetics 1:35 Challenge of prioritizing family, kids, and work 1:38 Separating work from home vs. going all in 1:41 What was Richard Branson was doing what while missing the birth of his child? 1:42 Who wears the pants in a house where Tung is the only male? 1:45 Severless architecture and containers 1:52 Devops engineering success in the enterprise is a cultural or engineering challenge? 2:04 Advice for beginners: you already know more than you think you know 2:06 The benevolent dictator and the commitment for life 2:09 A books mentioned in the show Growth Mindset Never Eat Alone How to Win Friends and Influence People The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way