I’ve Joined GasBuddy

As of about three months ago I’ve joined GasBuddy. After 5 mostly great years at PayPal I was excited by the possibilities of a company with so many loyal members — employees, merchants and end-users. I was even more excited about the team — initially Walt Doyle with whom I’ve worked in the past and is probably the main reason I managed to stay in Boston after Fig Card was acquired by PayPal. Several old friends have joined us and I’ve made some new ones. I’m writing this post here, now, as a preparation for a longer post on some of the larger technology decisions we’ve made over the last months. That requires that I set the scene.

GasBuddy was founded in 2000 (!) and is clearly one of the very first crowdsourced Internet applications. There were no smartphones then, making it even more impressive that it managed to gain traction. Given that timing, it’s no surprise that it is almost entirely a Microsoft stack and almost entirely self-hosted. The product works, is fairly responsive, and our user focus groups almost universally focused on the fact that the app and site do what they say and work when they need it. My friend Jeff Fagnan had an amazing quote about my previous company (povo.com) that I now use all the time — “These things are nothing until they’re everything.” Maybe GasBuddy isn’t everything, but it’s certainly made it beyond the nothing stage.

I wouldn’t have joined if the idea was to steward a working platform through a linear growth phase. Obviously we have big plans that involve significantly growing our members and merchant partners. So I’ve spent the better part of my time just trying to provide “context” to the team — introducing best practices like git flow and github, open sourcing technologies and patterns that are not inherently proprietary and just generally trying to help people realize the power a high functioning engineering team can exert. It was a very talented bunch to begin with, and modernizing our practices will make people more effective and just plain happier to work here.

Of course I’ve also spent time reviewing our code base and existing systems and, borrowing from PayPal, being “open honest and direct” about what we have. We didn’t have source control for the database, we didn’t have high availability for the database, and one person was basically on the hook if anything blew up. None of those things are true anymore.

So I’m very excited about times to come and getting back to an early stage company (it’s definitely not a startup) where we have to make fundamental technology decisions with fresh eyes. More about that shortly. Until then, download the app on iOS or Android to get a sense of what this community has built.