Hey! It’s been pretty quiet around here for a while — more than I’d like but it’s been a busy couple of months since I joined Inngest earlier this year in April. I’m completing some personal projects too at the moment and trying to get back to a more regular publishing cadence from September on. In the meantime, enjoy this blog post!
The search for a new challenge
After multiple attempts at building my own company, I decided it was time to switch things up. I was looking for a talented team focused on building a world-class product, preferably in the infra or DevTools space, preferably in the Bay Area. Around March, the landscape for engineering jobs wasn’t ideal, if you were aiming to get into BigTech. Fortunately, my favorite company environments start around product-market fit and scaling up.
Once I started interviewing with Darwin and the folks at Inngest, I immediately noticed the high energy and conviction with which they’re building a remarkable product. I ran some due diligence and checked on the competition, and even four months later our product is still the most powerful and easiest to learn out there. I was hooked, and luckily the team felt the same way, so I joined at the end of April.
The first months at Inngest
When I joined, I did multiple pairing sessions with Darwin and Tony to grasp the fundamentals of the engineering setup. In my second week, I started working on a critical project with Jack, the details of which have justified a blog post on the official company blog. After launching a set of infrastructure improvements to pool Redis connections in a dedicated service, we built, tested, and launched a sharding strategy within weeks. This was incredibly exciting and important for the infrastructure at the same time.
Fast forward to today, I’ve fully onboarded, worked on the core infrastructure, and already rolled out several mission-critical improvements which I’m very proud of. I’m also extremely grateful to everyone at Inngest for helping out wherever possible and sharing knowledge.
I’m writing this post on the plane back from Lisbon, where I just concluded my first offsite with the team. Working remotely can be hard because social connections and team bonding are hard to replicate in virtual meeting rooms. Having a week to get to know each other, tell stories, discuss current issues, and align everyone on the greater vision makes up for this. And it was an absolute blast.
The challenges ahead
Inngest, the product, has grown in usage by multiple orders of magnitude since I joined. Naturally, this presents a couple of challenges to the infrastructure we’ve been running for a while now. We’ve been hard at work designing and building the next version of many core infrastructure components to enable seamless growth for the next couple of years. We’ve made several key decisions that I’d love to share, but it will take some more time until we can unveil what we’re building.
At the same time, we’ll have to grow the team to free up capacity for building product features and other important work. We’re still in a stage where we operate with incredibly high autonomy, and taking ownership of areas of responsibility is expected.
I truly can’t wait for the months ahead!