Dan Pupius Makes It Look Easy
Medium’s Creation and Feedback Lead, the engineer behind the curtain
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Medium is simple by design, but engineering that simplicity is no small task. Dan Pupius (pronounced pew-pie-us), Medium’s Creation and Feedback Lead and Technical Lead for web client, notes, “There’s a lot of complexity that we hide from the users. Medium is not a simple product—it just looks simple.”
Currently in charge of Medium’s editor, feedback mechanisms, features such as notes, and front-end architecture, Pupius previously spent five years on the Gmail team and a year working on Google+. The Medium editor, he explains, “is based on the same code that powers the Gmail editor, but in many ways it’s more complicated because it has all of these extra layers on top. To the user, it appears a much simpler editor than the Gmail one.”
That simplicity serves to pare down the options available to writers in the traditional blogging experience. It also comes at a premium. “Creating the right constraints” on user experience might free the user “to just write,” but supporting those constraints makes for exceptional engineering challenges. Pupius contends that developing the platform has been a revelation in terms of user behavior:
Early on at Medium, we had this hypothesis that creating a simple editor, making writing look beautiful, would contribute to the quality of what users write. We thought that beauty and simplicity in a platform would be inherent encouragement to thoughtful writing. It was a little surprising that it actually happened—people have understood and acted on the vision so readily.
If he thrives on compelling professional challenges, Pupius also seeks out recreational ones. The “recovering adrenaline junkie”—“My name is Dan Pupius and it’s been 18 months since my last skydive”—notes that he’s “pretty much tried everything at some stage: heliboarding, skydiving, climbing. I still have a yearning for that sort of stuff.” Early in his career, Pupius supported this lifestyle by refusing to be tied down. Working as a contractor in England—his hometown is Sheffield —he had a few months free each year to snowboard and travel.
For several summers, Pupius volunteered in the cloud forest of Honduras with an organization that conducts research and conservation efforts: “I ran logistics for the Honduran base camp, which was in the jungle ten miles down a dirt road: organizing guides and cooks, ensuring medical evacuations were possible, arranging for food to be delivered.” He also honed a favorite hobby. “Machetes are the tool of choice in the jungle. And I juggle, so I juggled machetes,” he states matter-of-factly. “I injured myself twice, which isn’t too bad.”
Pupius shrugs off the daredevil nature of this party trick with characteristic nonchalance:
“Juggling is no good unless it’s with machetes or fire.”
A dedicated snowboarder, Pupius was halfway to Whistler to work at a ski resort when Google offered him a job. It was a different life path than hanging out as a full-time ski bum and part-time jungle base camp operator, but the decision wasn’t a difficult one: “I could always imagine myself living in California, with the quintessential weekend warrior lifestyle.”
In fact, his current predilection for weekend half-marathons and triathlons points to the kind of endurance mentality that Pupius brings to Medium. He is known around the office for espousing an engineering philosophy that privileges quality over velocity: “I can definitely be a little over the top about it. Over time, though, doing things right up front—not rushing early on—can save you from some serious infrastructure fires.”
To implement this philosophy, Pupius recognizes that “you have to expect you’ll be here in a year. I’ve always thought of Medium as a longer-term product, a potentially bigger platform, so you need to treat it as such.”
Discussing the careful ongoing iterations of the product, he reflects, “Why will people read something on Medium instead of somewhere else? The value will come from exploring a variety of content, getting connections to other things, interacting with the author in more meaningful ways because the commenting system is more granular. Rather than worrying exclusively about problems of scale, we’re giving ourselves enough time to work on the intricate problems involved in sharing stories and ideas.”
Creating elegant, sustainable solutions to those intricate problems is the main challenge as Medium moves forward with an ever-increasing number of users. In the meantime, Pupius will be behind the curtain, making it all look easy.
