Welcome to the WeSpire Engineering Blog! Why Am I Here?

This blog has been a long time coming. It’s been an effort that’s started a few different times over the course WeSpire’s history. Like many things we knew we should do, if it wasn’t a primary goal it eventually fell by the wayside. We just never put together enough items to define what the engineering blog would be and we certainly never put enough force or reasoning behind why we wanted to blog at all.

What Are We Writing About?

I’m sure the content of this blog will eventually drift from its initial aims. Right now, though, I can at least guess what we will cover. Development culture is always a fun one. It’s inherently subjective so pretty much any written opinion can’t be totally disproved, which is a big plus for me. I’m also a nut about how things are built and trying to squeeze a little bit more efficiency into all the things. So I’ve got a number of posts planned around trying to build software better and faster. And then there’ll be plenty around solving specific issues that we couldn’t easily Google, Stack Overflow, or intuit to victory. Instead we actually had to work to solve them. Hopefully, we can save you some of the pain we’ve experienced.

Obsession with purpose and the “why” of things is going to be a recurring theme on this blog. It’s both a personal strength of mine in that I have a good knack for diving into discovering why something is done, but it’s a weakness in that I tend to remember the conclusion and not the reasoning. Welcome to the ride.

Why am I Writing?

I live to drive business value (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if that is sarcasm or genuine as I’m honestly uncertain). But, no, seriously, there actually is a bunch of value to writing this bloody thing.

Speaking strictly monetarily, if a single highly qualified engineer decides to apply for a role at WeSpire as a result of reading this blog, it’s probably already paid back the effort involved. It doesn’t take too many $30k recruiting fees to add up to tangible money that accountants care about. Intangibly, it’s so fricking hard to hire for engineers since their attention is being constantly pulled by nigh-infinite other offers and shiny things. Getting the best people interested in your company is itself a tremendous win that will inevitably pay dividends. So if you’re looking for a job, keep reading — I think you’ll be pretty impressed by the problems we solve and the stuff we think about.

For me and my team I’m most personally interested in getting better at building stuff. Writing about what you are doing requires self-examination of fundamental skills. Writing develops overall teaching methodology and mechanisms for teaching that specific topic. And writing down thoughts organizes them so that you can actually persuade people that you are doing the right thing. These blog posts will become artifacts of team culture. They can help to confirm culture and help steer newbies into the culture. Because if you can’t persuade others that you are doing the right thing culturally or practically, eventually any successes you had building will be swept away when other people don’t follow your direction.

And hey, what about giving back to the community? WeSpire is inherently a purpose driven company. We want to make the world a better place (Mike Judge be damned, I’m going full speed ahead with this cliché). We’re hoping that you are in that together with us. Regardless, please, please feel free to start conversations with us about the things we are writing. Whatever it is that you are building, maybe we can help you and maybe you can help us. And who knows: maybe I can inspire someone out there to go and achieve my goals so that I don’t have to.

That’s Great, Dan, but, Really, Why Should I Bother Reading?

I think I’ve over-justified the reasoning on my side, but why are you here, dear reader? Well, maybe you’ve heard of us and you are looking to see if WeSpire has a role in which you are interested (shoot me an email: engineering-recruiting@wespire.com). Maybe you want to learn how to build a web startup. Or maybe you have a very specific problem to solve. Most likely, right now, you already work at WeSpire and you just want to hear me ramble for a while. Though, hopefully, I’ll start to get proportionally less of the last category. Let me know if you came here for a reason I didn’t expect.

So this is the promise. I’m going to write these things, for those reasons, with your potential audience types in mind. I’m going to assume you have at least some level of software experience. And I’m going to assume you have some level of patience since you’ve already read nearly 1000 words. I don’t really demand anything of you, though, I would love to have your thoughts if you are willing to share.