This talk from C3Fest summarizes the key lessons I've learned in the past ~15 years of working in tech startups. It's a high level overview of a new book I'm writing (60% done).
The talk came out great, if a little packed for 20min. Enjoy β€οΈ
For a 5pm last-talk-of-the-conference that's a pretty packed room.
Key points
With links to past articles because ideas take time to develop :)
- if the business isn't working, the rest doesn't matter
- how you scale the team impacts all else
- vertical over horizontal teams
- coordinating at the end is too late
- fast iteration cycles beat careful upfront design
- write boring code
- focus on architectural complexity
- data patterns beat code optimizations
- use vertical components (this one's a talk)
- separate deployment from delivery
- your code is not the goal, giving users new superpowers is
And here's one more cool pic from the talk.
As a side-note: this was my first time writing out the entire talk beforehand word for word. Tried a new app, iA Presenter, that turns your notes into a teleprompter.
The writing was useful and made the talk better. But I suck at using a teleprompter and the app way overestimates how fast I can read out loud so I had to improvise π
Cheers,
~Swizec
Continue reading about Scaling Fast, my talk on lessons from tech startups
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- Notes for my Scaling Fast talk next week
- You do have time to build it twice
- Can I get your opinion
- Forget Bad Code, Focus on the System βΒ React Summit talk
- I'm a different engineer than I was 3 years ago
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below π
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails π on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. π"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help π swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers π ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are β€οΈ