How a move to the Bay Area became a career in Engineering
Thirdweb is working in a different and exciting new space and for that reason it feels like a great place for me especially because we move fast and have amazing talent. I get to keep chasing my curiosity here. — Danny Friday, Infrastructure Software Engineer at thirdweb
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb.
My name is Danny and I work at thirdweb on the infrastructure team. I build scalable systems that are resilient enough to work with partners, like Shopify.
It’s a huge challenge because any bit of downtime leads to potentially tens or hundreds of customers pointing it out to us. We feel empathy for developers when that happens, so it can be a little demanding but it’s also fulfilling since we’re creating a system design that scales.
Not many startups give you an opportunity to do that or think in that way because they’re not in working to that same scale — but we are and we’re doing it at a really early stage. We’re not cowboy coding — we have to be intentional and be diligent about how we spend our time to ship.
Thirdweb is working in a different and exciting new space and for that reason it feels like a great place for me especially because we move fast and have amazing talent. I get to keep chasing my curiosity here.
Before my time at thirdweb, I dropped out of college when I was 19 because I didn’t enjoy it. I literally got on a greyhound and went to the Bay Area without knowing anyone and a couple months later got a job as an iOS engineer to build mobile apps.
I did that for 2–3 years and then transitioned into building a games company which was really fun. I struck partnerships with record companies since we built white label games. After 3 years I decided to grow technically and work with a really amazing team in a space that I really cared about. I worked for a company doing AI and ecommerce and learned a lot about both of those spaces.
What are the values/team principles of the engineering team?
I really resonate with our 1 hour 1 day 1 week shipping principle: how do we get a project that might need a week to be done in a day? How can we take that further and see what deliverable we can provide in an hour?
The nice thing about this, is that it forces you to realize what might be wasting time and what’s actually necessary. It’s a huge benefit. You end up planning in your head what the result is and working backwards from there.
It’s easy to get dragged in to a vision and not figure out the execution, but this principle allows us to do that.
How does thirdweb view engineering?
Some companies put engineering on a pedestal. Those companies miss out on opportunities to fuel other aspects of the business.
Our engineering team bleeds into every part of the business to be more engineering forward. We’re not necessarily viewed differently from other aspects of the company because we’re baked into all aspects.
Tell us about thirdweb’s approach to engineering.
I’m relatively new so I’m still learning this! From what I’ve seen, we look for the quick solve and are big on iteration. We also try to be empathetic to customers at all times. As developers ourselves we really understand where they’re coming from. When you’re at the intersection of other industries that can be hard for engineering to have.
There’s a focus on the customer and that obsession makes us go above and beyond and I’ve seen it multiple times. People are asking themselves: how would I want this to work? Instead of ‘this is what was in the ticket or described in Slack’.
People come up with all kinds of ideas when they see the finished product and figure out how we can get fixes done without derailing our roadmap.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the engineering team?
It makes it exciting for me personally because I’m driven by curiosity. So when I meet other people on the team who are more experienced in a domain — that’s an exciting moment for me. Some of the most important skills I’ve learned as an engineer I’ve done by observing others and learning how they think. Difference in skill level presents the opportunity to learn and also teach.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
We’re an early stage start up so every early stage company deals with course correcting mid-flight.
Engineering will always lag behind product, naturally. We do have that struggle but it isn’t necessarily unique to thirdweb. The principles that we bring towards engineering and strength of our founders means that we have a strong level of empathy for engineering tasks and what they involve.
So we simplify how we course correct because we have visibility into the approach vs merely course correcting.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
I’m working on a storage system that is faster than what you can find out there in the market. It’s going to also be cheaper. We’re able to bring a 25% savings on uploads for example, which is a very critical part of the ecosystem when you’re launching an NFT and people have to download it. Or when you’re deploying a contract and you have to make an update.
Reducing that iteration cycle time is important. The work I’m doing reduces the time that it takes other blockchain developers to get their work done.
Authors: Erika Khanna & Danny Friday
Contributors: Joher Khan
