Research shows start-ups with experienced founders are more likely to
succeed, and build more valuable companies too. But if you want to found a
company, how do you get that experience?
My experience says the fast-track is joining an existing start-up and riding
that wave, taking the opportunities that come with growth. This post
explains what you can expect to learn, and why it's so valuable if you ever
want to start your own thing.
Continue reading
When it comes to complex systems, you can only go so far with synthetic
experiments before you need to try something for real, and test in
production.
There's no substitute for it, and you're likely making the wrong decision if
you avoid it. But I can say from experience it's not without risks, and this
post shares an example of where we got as much as possible from that
prework and testing, even if it was a bit of a bumpy ride.
Continue reading
This talk shares my experience leading an SRE team, scaling from three people
running all of the company’s infrastructure to a product-centric Platform
Engineering team building tools for 200 other engineers.
I’ll explain the challenges we faced at each stage – problems that are
common across engineering orgs – and the pragmatic steps we took to solve
them, helping us get value before going all-in on an Internal Developer
Platform.
Continue reading
Asked for my most impactful code contribution, I discuss a small change that
had short and long-lasting impact, far beyond what I originally intended.
Continue reading
Go doesn't have sum types, but generics get us one step closer to a useful
polyfill. If you've ever wanted exhaustive case statements, this post is for
you.
Continue reading
Using a sync cutoff when building our dbt models helped fix our flaky tests,
making our CI much more reliable and exposing latent bugs.
Continue reading
Data should be a commodity, and accessible to everyone in a company. We've
picked a data stack for tools that make this possible- here's what we use,
how it's configured, and why we picked it.
Continue reading
Tie together backend and frontend using type-safe API clients, allowing the
TypeScript and Go compilers to prevent typos and developer errors.
Continue reading
When in a Postgres transaction, the data you read can change underneath you.
Did you realise this? Many don't, for good reasons.
Continue reading
Fast build times have a number of benefits, from reliability to developer
happiness. We reduces our time to deploy to <5, and it's glorious.
Continue reading