Hi guys, good idea to make this book. We also experienced a lot of challenges, as we grow our team.

We are about 25+ technical people, spread between feature engineering teams, platform engineering, tech ops engineering, and live services. All technical people, but working on different areas of delivering our products.

In summary, what we have learned is in the beginning, every things seems obvious and serial, where people work on all kinds of tasks, without care of which area or phase of the delivery. After a while, certain areas break, since it demands more attention. And as we are all hackers, we tend to fix it the way we fix software bugs.

Over time, we’ve come to realize, that not all problems are related to software, some are related to our process, some related to the people involved, and sometimes even to the expectations we set in our product and in our work. Coupled that with a fast changing roadmap, as we try to reach a good market fit, then you see the whole thing getting into a mess.

One item that i think stood out for us, is the resiliency, trust, and technical foundation of the core members. Since all founding teams stood behind us until now (nearing 10 years), it gave us the room to stretch, break, and evolve, without losing the whole team.

I’m looking forward to when the book is finished. Even a draft, i’ll volunteer to proof-read it! :) There’s always many more things to learn, and i like that we can get into the minds of those who also battled the same demons in building software.

p.s. I wonder if there’s a discussion group relating this? it would be interesting to participate.