Another year is coming to a close, so it’s time for another annual review! This has become a personal tradition, check out last year’s review if you haven’t done so already!
Early in 2024, I was working hard on building CodeTrail, a new take on documentation for engineering teams. During this time, I learned a lot about sales, marketing, and distribution. While Tim was working hard on building the product, I took over sales, creating cold outreach sequences, calling up potential customers, running demos, following up to leads — to make it short, I did everything under the sun to get our first customers on board. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, we were bound to fail.
Neither me nor Tim had a large platform, both of us previously worked on high-growth startups but we underestimated the difficulty of activating our networks to discover the best pilot customers. We were solving a problem both of us experienced in our previous jobs, but in a market of layoffs and fears of an economic downturn, onboarding software understandably wasn’t on people’s minds. While we were able to craft a high-quality product, we were fighting an uphill battle in one of the most risk-averse markets on the planet.
After half a year, Tim and I decided to wind down our efforts on CodeTrail in order to reflect what we were missing to succeed and plan the next steps accordingly, removing any barriers to retry a couple years in the future.
While Tim is focusing on academia, I decided it made most sense to join a fast-moving team I could grow with. I spent March applying at and interviewing with 30+ companies in different growth stages and industries. At one point in my discovery stage, I got introduced to Inngest, a Bay Area/US startup solving the hard problem of building reliable software, a passion area of mine I spent the past years of my life working on. After the first interviews with the team, I was fully convinced that this was the best possible option out there.
I joined the engineering team at Inngest exactly 8 months ago in late April. Since then, we’ve increased our product usage nearly 20x, which introduced scaling challenges I had the opportunity to solve.
During my first weeks of onboarding, I built batch keys, a new feature to group event batches by a user-supplied expression. This is helpful in multi-tenant scenarios, for example to group in-app notifications for a given user, or creating massive mailing campaigns.
After my first project, I started focusing on systems and infrastructure, joining our founding engineer Jack Williams in implementing a critical new service for disaggregating access to our primary data store, and implementing a sharding strategy for horizontal scaling. These improvements enabled us to handle 100k+ QPS comfortably without a second of downtime. If you’re curious about the full story, you can read more on the Inngest blog.
After ensuring our infrastructure could handle the increased demand, I moved on to the core queueing systems, implementing a new architecture to improve multi-tenant fairness and throughput globally and for each account. Once this was rolled out, I spearheaded sharding efforts around the queue, unlocking horizontal scaling to handle a 5x increase in queue throughput.
I’ve learned a lot about designing, building, and operating distributed systems, performing gradual rollouts without degrading system availability, and engineering in high-growth environments. For the last months of 2024, I’ve been working on a major upcoming product and infrastructure feature, unlocking enterprise security, higher end-to-end throughput at lower latency, and a new execution model altogether. I’m excited to share more news on this soon!
Joining a fully-remote team also gave me the opportunity to meet everyone in person in Lisbon and San Francisco for company-wide and engineering offsites.
If you had told me what was about to happen throughout the year in January, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I’m forever grateful for the warm welcome by the Inngest team. I’m having an absolute blast working together with everyone and learning new things every day. Joining Inngest reignited my passion of engineering highly-scalable systems, making trade-offs to fit the growth stage, and building with a strong vision in mind.
Moving on to 2025, I’m excited to share big personal news relatively soon. Onward and upward.
— Bruno