Systems Architecture
In most successful companies, products and their underlying infrastructure are constantly evolving to changing needs and growing demand. Shipping new features, improvements, or other changes can require careful planning ahead of a release. While you can try to imagine and rule out different failure scenarios ahead of time, you never
Systems Architecture
When working on projects in the past, I’ve always wondered about the perfect time to lock down interfaces. In the first steps of building an idea, you’re not quite sure what data you need to exchange yet and which operations should be exposed via APIs. Perhaps you don’
Engineering Management
As teams grow, managers invariably start to think about dividing the former team into smaller groups working on specific features or areas, in most cases supported by people or small teams that focus on tooling, infrastructure, and other “meta” tasks that enable engineering. In some cases, external advisors are brought
Engineering Management
This post is the first part of the Behind the Scenes series on building the first iteration of Anzu. While we keep on building and improving the next iteration of Anzu, I felt it would be useful to write down what went well with the first iteration, and what didn’
Engineering Management
Most software companies don’t ever get to see a steady state, where the core product has been built, the rate of innovation decreases, and maintenance and minor improvements become the primary workload. In this world, priorities shift from figuring out the product, to ensuring customers are happy and keeping
Node.js
A short feedback loop between writing and running code is critical for seeing how changes apply to a codebase. The longer the time to see results, the more inefficient and cumbersome it becomes to write and test software. Usually, delays are caused by build tooling, which performs steps like compiling
Product Development
tl;dr: Stop overengineering, think of the first iteration of a feature, build it, ship it, get feedback, and improve it. Building a software product isn't always straightforward. You might have a vision of how you want your product to look like, having thought of well-designed features that
Evergreen
For millions of people, the past months have radically changed their lives. In my case, one of the most impactful changes was the gradual transition into working fully remotely, or to working from home. I've always cherished the office as a hub to meet my colleagues, communicate and
Evergreen
When building customer-facing systems, especially in the realm of SaaS businesses, it's important to get a couple design aspects of your system right early on, if you want to plan at scale and grow without unexpected side effects. Scaling out software infrastructure for large customers, especially enterprise clients,
Evergreen
If you work on a software project, no matter your role, you'll make and a lot of decisions and witness even more being made. Ranging from minor choices between code style A or B to rather impactful ones like where to store data, and why that should be
Evergreen
Deciding how and when to ship a new feature can be a sensitive topic. Nobody wants to break production and upset customers. And still, deploying to production tens to hundreds of times a day has become common for a lot of companies. In this post, I want to explore how
Engineering Management
Writing software tests is one of the most important steps throughout the software development lifecycle. Preventing regressions and validating that business logic works as expected are much-needed guarantees when building a software product. Customer feedback should never be the primary source of learning that something does not work, at least
Engineering Management
Imagine the following: You've just completed a polished new feature, upgraded some dependencies, found some code paths that needed refactoring and worked on several other things you're about to release. Unfortunately, your existing commit messages look something like the following: $ git log Commit 453a620131169ed327d8d35ba4952ba5 added cool