We’re not building a generic notes app. We’re also not building an app for everyone. We are building a product that reduces the cognitive load for people with lots of meetings. Something that enables people with lots of context switching to ensure they don’t miss follow-ups. Something that makes relevant…

In Part 1, I discussed the important aspects of a good incident management practice including effective communication, clearly defined stakeholders, and getting timely resolution. Now let’s dig into some tactical considerations of incident response. Before you can give quality updates during an incident, you need to have good information to…

Shit happens. No amount of planning, preparation, or conservative practices can prevent incidents. Some items are simply outside of our control and it isn’t possible to plan for every imaginable scenario. Low probability events will still occur. What we can do is develop effective incident management practices so that we…

When running on a cloud platform such as GCP, there are many ways to build an application. Google offers a comprehensive range of options spanning from fully serverless options, such as Firebase, to dedicated VM hosts, known as sole-tenant nodes. …

This post is a follow-up to our summary of the differences between AWS and GCP. To summarize: AWS is more of an “ops engineer’s cloud”, GCP is more of a “software engineer’s cloud.” This post is meant to provide a real example you can follow along with. …

When you are building a new application or service, how do you change runtime settings and configuration? How do you enable new features? How do you debug data issues? Do you manually change settings in the database? Do you handle all configuration via command flags? Do you connect your database’s…

Determining how to structure your environments is a frequent topic of discussion for us. It comes up in almost every client engagement we have and we have needed to make these decisions ourselves many times. We frequently see two patterns. One option is to have everyone, or large groups, bucketed…

Google App Engine Standard (GAE) was released in mid 2008. It was a much simpler, much more limited version of the GAE available today. Building applications took real commitment, but if you stuck it out and learned the nuances it was — is — nearly magical. The problem is that…

Some teams are unstoppable. They are driven by an unseen force to continually produce and deliver value. These teams appear to require less effort and coordination than typical teams, yet they deliver more. …