Context: someone recently asked me how I approach hiring engineers, so I tried to capture my notes on the subject.

Hi again. I threw a fresh coat of paint on the blog. I’m hoping to share more regularly in the coming months. I’ve got plenty of writing from past teams that I’d like to expand into longer pieces here. If there’s anything specific you’d like to hear about, let me know. I might experiment with Substack or other distribution options too, though I don’t plan to wire up email here (it’s easier than ever to roll your own these days).

I was recently having a conversation with an engineering leader at another company, and he was curious about standups. His company wanted to be agile, so his product leader set up standups for the team as well as the accompanying ceremonies to round out the Scrum experience, but he was concerned that it seemed like a waste of time. He wanted to know what it was like for other companies.

This isn’t a thing, but I wish it were. I’m not sure what valuation it’d be. Maybe $500M? Maybe it’s just a boring $1B as companies like Snowflake obliterate decacorn status.

Automate all the things.

• Make scripts
• Check them twice
• Cron them
• A min saved is $$$ earned

Pay people what they’re worth. If at any time you think you’re getting a good deal, pay them more.

If you can count your number of engineers on one or two hands, don’t worry about what agile framework is going to work best for you.

If you’re an engineer, you might spell agile with four letters depending on your assessment of how well your company practices it.

Keep HR, people ops, etc in the loop. No reason not to. Plus you don’t want to make them angry.

Know how fast you can deploy code. Then make it faster

I’ve lost a full sprint’s worth of time debating what a story point is. What is it? It’s something that sucks. That’s it.

Cloud credits for startups work. My current company has some degree of infrastructure across all major cloud providers—probably because at one point in time we were offered free credits.

Never underestimate the power of a couple large pizzas. It’s a simple gesture.

I ran into this the other day when working on a simple flask app, so I thought I’d share this if anyone else was banging their head like I was.

There are two main steps to setting up SSL in Nginx with Docker: