Latest Articles
Avoid Premature Optimization: Growth Advice for Early Stage Founders
Early-stage founders often ask what I could do for them, and how they might go about spinning up a growth team.
The Alexey Test: 11 steps to better Growth Engineering
Growth Engineering is a growing profession these days. But before you accept a shiny new job as a Growth Engineer, you should figure out the state of the...
Hamtips, or why I still run the Technical Phone Screen as the Hiring Manager
It stands for “Hiring Manager Technical Phone Screen.” Since you asked, I’ve been pronouncing it “ham-tips.” It’s the call a candidate will have after th...
A toolset for tackling technical debt
Not what you want to hear as the freshly-appointed Engineering Manager on a critical team. Leadership expects the team to deliver on key new features, bu...
Technical Interview Superforcasters
The new VP wants us to double engineering’s headcount in the next six months. If we have a chance in hell to hit the hiring target, you seriously need to...
Lessons Learned: Giving Feedback as an Engineering Manager
Earlier in the year, I became the Engineering Manager on a team responsible for half of the outages at our 2,000 person company. After each incident, the...
Working Remotely Crossed the Chasm on May 12, 2020
From academia to the Open Source movement, remote collaboration is not exactly novel. From Github to DuckDuckGo, remote-first successful businesses are n...
Confessions of a Deadbeat Open Source Maintainer
The year was 2013, Meteor was the hip new kid on the block and Coffeescript was a reasonable JS dialect choice. We were fresh out of college. Meteor was...
Test Driven Interviewing
TDD forces you into the ideal mindset for nailing down (1) problem definitions. There's no better way to properly grok a problem than to have to think th...
Dependonate: Donate to your dependencies
Giving back to open source projects you benefit from is one of those obviously-good-in-theory-confusing-in-practice ideas, like eating healthy or being c...