Scaling Fast Book

Taming chaos is a learnable skill

How you approach software engineering makes it harder or easier to handle interruptions and other chaos. Writing a behavioral interview made me realize this is a learnable skill!

Probably the realest thing I ever wrote

The 3 curves that make a scalable business

You want users and revenue to grow exponentially. Bugs per day to grow linearly. Support work to grow logarithmically. Your goal is to make this happen.

In praise of the stacked pull request

How fast you do code review is how fast you do everything. Your PR queue is the leading indicator of team velocity. Stacked PRs can help.

How you migrate is everything

Your code becomes legacy software when it works. You build something to solve a problem, then the problem changes. Or best practices evolve. Or you hire team members with more experience. Or the world changes. Or you have more people touching the same code and your beautiful architectural vision didn't translate.

The future of software engineering is SRE

When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.

Place good startup bets

You can't win every bet. Your goal is to be a little more right than wrong and keep playing

Small projects, clear scope

Minutes of planning save you days of programming. It is shocking how little planning it takes to make a big difference.