Just a quilt of ideas, musings, and observations from the world of software development from our team.
This week, we’re diving into part two of our conversation with Charity Majors. Charity is the CTO at Honeycomb, a company that builds observability for distributed systems. Charity’s team is on a mission to make monitoring less cumbersome so that being on-call can suck less.
In this episode, we talk about how to hire the right seniority mix for your team and ensure you see everyone at their best, both when they’re interviewing for a job and once they’ve started.
Read MoreCharity Majors is the CTO at Honeycomb, a startup that builds observability for distributed systems. Charity’s team is on a mission to make monitoring less cumbersome so that being on-call can suck less.
In this episode, we talk about when pain and discomfort is okay in your professional life (and when it’s not). We also talk about hiring practices and why more people should quit their job.
Read MoreLambda School has been in the news a ton for the way they’re revolutionizing the financial model of education. Today, we get to talk with one of the architects of this revolution. Bob is the VP of Engineering at Lambda School. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lambda School is a coding academy that aims to help anyone, from any background, get a high-paying job in software development.
In this episode, we talk about the importance of speed at an early-stage startup, why deliberate communication is essential for remote teams, and how we can be more productive by removing distractions.
Read MoreJohn Harden is the Principal Software Engineer at Kerauno. Kerauno is a workflow and communication software company that just raised a $25M Series A. When he’s not leading a high-growth development team, he’s mentoring for two coding academies, Eleven Fifty and Kenzie Academy.
In this episode, we talk about his experience both hiring and mentoring coding bootcamp alumni, finding mentorship early in your career, and the importance of “tech jams” when scoping a project.
Read MoreMax Yoder is the founder and CEO of Lessonly, a team learning and training software company that raised a $8M Series B in late 2017. Max’s team is dedicated to helping people “Do Better Work,” which is where he got the title of his new book, Do Better Work: Finding Clarity, Camaraderie, and Progress in Work and Life.
Read MoreMiles is a Partner at Fretless, a custom software development shop that helps software companies level-up their software chops. Miles’ team specializes in coming into high-growth teams and acting as an interim software leader. He has worked with startup and scale-ups to help them overcome technical debt and build the engineering team that can help them hit their future product goals.
Read MoreThis week, we’re changing things up a little bit. Today, we’re going to try something new. Instead of talking to one engineering leader about a variety of topics, we’re going super deep by talking to multiple folks about a single topic.
Read MoreToday’s a really exciting day for us. Our startup just acquired a New York City-based tech hiring platform called Headlight.
We're sitting down with Wayne Gerard to talk about this transition. We wanted to know what they’ve learned while uncovering some of the best software engineers in New York City. Over the past two years, they’ve uncovered hidden gems and made the hiring process better for both developers and hiring managers. What’s more, they did it in one of the nation’s most competitive job markets. We could all learn something from their story.
Read MoreIndianapolis, IN: Woven, a software company that helps high-growth engineering teams hit ambitious hiring goals, has acquired Headlight, a tech screening platform based out of New York. This acquisition will provide Woven customers with a deeper bench of candidate assessments, while providing Headlight clients with dedicated support moving forward.
Read MoreToday on Scaling Software Teams, we’re joined by Christine Spang, Co-Founder and CTO at Nylas - an API built to integrate clients’ email, calendar, and contact applications in one seamless interface. We talked to Christine about her self-care philosophy - as well as her thoughts on the current state of diversity in tech, and why hiring rubrics need to confront many of the biases present in the humans who construct them.
Read MoreAmjad is the founder and CEO of Repl.it. Repl.it is a Y Combinator-backed online development environment that helps developers learn, build, collaborate, and host all in one place. They’re on a mission to make programming more accessible.
In this episode, Amjad shared why he believes that discovery great people is the key to great teams. He contrasts that with talent identification, which is about credentials and resumes.
Read MoreMitch Stewart is the co-founder of Guru, a software company based out of Pennsylvania that is working with companies like Shopify, Square, and Spotify to unify their team’s collective knowledge and empower them with information when they need it most.
In this episode, we talk about some of the management practices that have made Mitch successful at Guru. We dive into his transition from developer to manager, and the lessons he learned about building and motivating teams along the way.
Read MoreThis week on Scaling Software Teams, we talked to Austin Broyles, the Director of Engineering at Primer - a Bay Area software company using Machine Learning and natural language processing to help their clients make sense of huge datasets.
Read MoreOn this week’s episode of Scaling Software Teams, we talked with Eric Tobias, former CTO at iGoDigital and currently a Partner with High Alpha, a Venture studio that conceives, launches, and scales next-generation enterprise cloud companies.
Read MoreAde Olonoh is the founder of two companies with similar names, but very different stories.
Formstack is an online form builder that has witnessed slow, steady growth since its founding in 2006. Formspring was an anonymous social Q&A app that grew from zero users to over a million users in 45 days, making it the fastest growing social network in history at the time.
In this episode, Ade shared what he’s learned about fast growth, as someone who naturally a steady approach.
Read MoreIn 2018, TechPoint partnered with Woven to screen the engineering applications for their Xtern program, and the result was 75% assessment completion rate, a dramatic increase over the prior year. The secret to improvement wasn’t luck or magic. It was a tried-and-true formula that Woven’s Founders had crafted while screening over 2,000 engineering candidates throughout their careers.
Read MoreIn part one of our conversation, we discussed how Jacob helps rapid-growth software companies navigate change using the Satir Change Model, and how prioritizing the emotional well-being of contributors is the key to weathering whatever storm comes your way. Today’s interview touches on two things that every startup leader should be thinking about as they grow their team: how to craft company policies that are equitable and accessible to all, and how to document those policies so they have an equitable impact.
Read MoreIf you’re on a fast-growth software team, you know that change is inevitable. But when you’re a team leader within your organization, people will look to you to weather this change, and to help them determine what their future looks like. In our recent conversation with Jacob Kaplan-Moss, we discussed one such process - the Satir Change Model - and how it’s helped several fast-growth software teams navigate change without going off the deep end.
Read MoreThis week on Scaling Software Teams, we’re sharing part one of our interview with Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob is a veteran software leader and the co-creator of Django, the python web framework that powers Pinterest, Eventbrite, and Instagram. Chances are, many of our listeners are using Django to build their own startup, so this is a really cool listen.
Read MoreAccording to the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, nearly one in five developers say that they struggle with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, or both. If this is something that you or your team struggles with, one of the easiest ways to reverse the trend is my creating a strong culture of psychological safety among your team.
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