Engineering

As developers, we like to build things. When a product manager or a user asks for a feature, our natural response is “Sure, I can do that in two days.” But every “Yes” is a commitment to maintain that code forever. The Feature Creep Trap The most successful products aren’t the ones with the most features; they’re the ones with the right features. Every button you add to a UI makes every other button slightly less important. Every branch in your code makes the next bug slightly harder to find. ...

I see many teams claim they have “CI/CD” because they have a Jenkins or GitHub Actions pipeline that runs tests. But if your process involves a “Freeze Week” or a “Manual QA Sign-off” that takes 3 days, you don’t have CI/CD. You have an automated build process. The Goal: Confidence The goal of CI/CD isn’t to run scripts. It’s to give the team enough confidence that a commit can go to production without human intervention. ...

We’ve all been there. You’re working on a feature, and you need to parse some weirdly formatted date or handle a complex file upload. Your first instinct? npm install or bundle add. It feels like winning. Someone else already solved this problem! Why should I reinvent the wheel? The “Free” Wheel But here’s the thing: every dependency you add is a liability. It’s code you didn’t write, but code you now own. You own its bugs, its security vulnerabilities, and its breaking changes when it decides to “improve” its API. ...

Around 2 years ago, I started a new management gig. it wasn’t the first, but it was the first with a relatively large team. One of the most basic things I needed to do as a manager was to bind the team to its mission, and in simple terms: get them super motivated to do their day to day tasks. I’m a strong preacher for freedom, it gives people a sense of ownership. ...

We all wanna get from 0 to 1 (with many trailing zeros), the sooner the better. So, what’s the problem? You build something and you’re brave enough to put it out there, now what? Now you start the endless feedback loop cycle, you look at the data, analytics, user recordings, product inputs, and decide what’s the next thing that’ll make your product better then ever, it’s an iterative process that never ends. The faster you iterate, the faster you’ll get to your target. ...