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6 posts tagged with "storytime"

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Building culture is hard, sustaining it is harder

· 17 min read
TL;DR

I experienced first-hand what it was like to work in a company with a really strong culture of knowledge management, and watched what it took to build and sustain it. I also witnessed the factors that caused it to eventually crumble.

A Roman aqueduct

My current company is struggling with some challenges that are pretty typical for a wildly successful startup that's rapidly grown into a medium-sized company. We've got the expected technical debt, organizational design challenges, and a seemingly infinite number of small systems that work great... until they catch fire as we hit new scaling thresholds.

That one time I did something important

· 17 min read
TL;DR

This is the story of the most impactful accomplishment of my career (building Vistaprint's Studio), which happened to be as an individual contributor.

For those of us who've actively chosen to remain active technologists, and have resisted the pressure to join management, it's important to remember that innovation is ultimately driven by individuals.

Light bulb with a fire in it

A commonly accepted notion in software engineering leadership is that managers have a much bigger potential for impact on a business than an individual contributor. This is certainly a credible argument, given that a great manager can have a huge impact through building a great team. They're responsible for recruiting the right people, steering the culture, and making the biggest decisions about what risks to take, what opportunities to pursue, etc. Ultimately, they're accountable for what the team delivers.

Developer experience is a product

· 14 min read
TL;DR

The most important feature of an internal developer platform is that the team that builds it has to compete to win over their users.

Figure out your initial value proposition, build a minimum viable product, get it in front of customers, listen, learn, and iterate.

Platforms imposed by a top-down mandate tend to fail.

Developer Experience Soda

Over the past 15 years, I've been working on one form or another of internal developer platform. Even long before, while working at small startups, I inevitably ended up building (or curating) some little web framework, a build system, and slapping together scripts to package and deploy our stuff reliably. No one ever told me to do this, it was just obviously necessary.

In these cases, I was building a product for myself and my immediate team members, so it was a pretty tight feedback loop with the customer. I'd put a little extra effort to make things nice for other developers on my team, and also out of a bit of pride in making something that felt elegant.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

· 11 min read
Less than a thousand flowers

I've been reflecting recently on a really formative period in my career, when I had a chance to be part of a massive experiment in progressive engineering management.

About 3 and a half years before I left Vistaprint, I was asked to join the Engineering leadership team by our (relatively) new VP of Engineering, Erin DeCesare (who is now the CTO of EZCater). She was a particularly bold leader in terms of her progressive management ideas, and was rapidly reshaping the organization with a strong set of values around empowerment and servant leadership.

How I quit painting and became a computer geek

· 4 min read

For those of you who knew me as a painter (up until about 1999), you may be confused to hear that I quit painting completely and I'm now working as a software engineer.

So here's the deal: My junior year in college at Cooper Union (an art school), after having already spent close to 7 years painting seriously, I went online for the first time- did some email, played around on the web. I decided in order to prevent myself from becoming a total Luddite, I should learn some stuff about using computers to make art. So I started with photoshop, a little illustrator and flash. After a semester, it occurred to me that this might lead to a reasonably comfortable day job to help support my painting habit.