Desmond Brand

…rproductive in other areas where internal communication is critical like engineering and marketing. If you quadruple your engineering headcount in a year, you will likely have less absolute throughput than if you doubled headcount. As an added bonus, you will burn way more cash. Even worse, you will lose cultural consistency as new people with little guidance will come in with…

An excellent constraining principle when planning your budget is the preservation of cultural cohesion. The enemy of cultural cohesion is super-fast headcount growth. Companies that grow faster than doubling their headcount annually tend to have serious cultural drift, even if they do a great job of onboarding new employees and training them. Sometimes this kind of growth is necessary and manageable in certain functions like sales, but is u…

Engineering growth rate — Unless you are making an acquisition and running it separately or sub-dividing engineering in some novel way, you should strive not to more than double a monolithic engineering organization in a 12-month period.

I was surprised to discover that one student’s company had chosen to architect their system around Kafka. This was surprising because, as far as I could tell, their business processed just a few dozen very high value transactions per day—perhaps a few hundred on a good day. At this throughput, the primary datastore could be a human writing into a physical book.

… rather than the raw number of current leads and deals. Why does everyone present this incorrectly? Because there is no reconciliation between the marketing system and the sales system … until now.

One consequence of this decision to expose these APIs with a synchronous interface was that there was no syntactic difference between an API that would complete consistently with low latency variance and an API that could block for seconds. In fact, sometimes an API’s behavior might change release-to-release as new features (distributed file systems or distributed directories) were added. Despite the syntactic similarity, the actual use of such a blocking API needed to be managed very differently inside an interactive application. The consequence of misuse was generally application hangs — far too common in Windows applications.

The dynamic you see with especially long-lived code bases like Office is that the amount of framework code becomes dominated over time by the amount of application code and in fact frameworks over time get absorbed into the overall code base. The framework typically fails to evolve along the path required by the product — which leads to the general advice “you ship it, you own it”. This means that you eventually pay for all that code that lifted your initial productivity. So “free code” tends to be “free as in puppy” rather than “free as in beer”.

…yapf in python and prettier in the JS ecosystem) combined with CI/CD (Travis, CircleCI, or similar) there should be precisely zero time spent reviewing formatting errors and catching similar programming and styling errors that can be detected by a machine. A reviewer probably shouldn’t even note them; just let the automated systems catch them. Computers are infinitely better compilers, linters, and code formatters than humans are. Let the co…

…of us knew anything coming in; freight forwarding is not something anyone does for fun on weekends. The most successful engineers at Flexport are those that have really great communication skills and who lean on their teammates to help them learn about what they’re doing. This isn’t a place where you can silently code in the corner of a room.

There’s high impact. A great high impact example I like to give is that one of our new hires at the time, Will Humphreys-Cloutier, built a carbon calculator during a hackathon, which will probably save more carbon emissions than basically any non-profit he could have started.