Learning to scale as a leader through easy-to-remember mantras. — If you are a born leader, you’ll find yourself spending increasing amounts of time in discussions helping people make decisions. At a small scale, you can do this by just adding meetings to your calendar or more emails in your inbox. But inevitably, you will reach your maximum capacity. The…

My experience deploying Helm charts on eight cloud providers. — I recently wrote a blog post about how the future of software development is likely to involve remote development. Remote development is when you shift the compute-heavy tasks on your laptop (compiling, testing, and local process execution) to the cloud. The post sparked a lot of debates, but one, in…

Using Coder-OSS to demonstrate the power of Kubernetes-based development environments. — I have spent a decade in charge of development tooling teams. During that time, I watched the rise and fall of Vagrant and the introduction of Docker and a plethora of other build tools. I remember when most developers had two desktops under their desks, and I helped with the…

Crazy 8’s, Speed Dating Feedback, and Strengthfinders — Everyone wants a great offsite, but finding an activity that gets everyone engaged without feeling cheesy can be a struggle. Some people like interactive sessions about spending time together, but others hate sessions that aren’t focused on furthering the team or business goals. Thus my strategy is simple: come up…

Comparing the Top 11 Status Page Companies — Every SaaS company needs to create a status page at some point in its evolution. How do you decide between all the different vendors? Goal: identify the best status page for my mid-sized startup. Skydio’s cloud product lets you fly a drone from anywhere worldwide from a browser. As organizations…

And unsurprisingly, most of these books aren’t worth reading in their entirety. — The biggest challenge in writing is creating content worth reading. I’ve read many leadership and technical books over the years. Years after reading them, I only remember a few key snippets. Last year, I embraced the idea that most self-improvement books contain only a few key points worth remembering. I started a Google Sheet to start tracking these summaries.

A look back at the past year and how it transformed my career. — Over the last year, I transformed my stagnant career by writing blog posts as a vector for networking. This article is a cathartic celebration of my first year of writing and its impact on my career. I started writing blog posts as a means of advancing my career and growing…

Explaining SOC 2 from an engineering mindset. — Compliance gets a bad rap. Most people roll their eyes with disdain when they hear “compliance.” Their first exposure to compliance is usually from some compliance nerd pushing overbearing, poorly thought-out security controls that strictly hurt productivity. This focus turns engineers off. It even upsets security engineers, as the time…

Defining L1-L6 for individual contributors and leads — Every software company eventually has to deal with the job title problem. Some organizations go with a “flat” system, but in absence of a title system, shadow hierarchies will appear, which are actually worse. Titles give a clear demarcation around the impact expectations of each role. For example, it is…