Connor Roane

After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

115

12 Comments

Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

26

I've been thinking about the challenge of preserving the "low priority voice" as software products scale. As teams and projects grow, folks outside of development and product positions seem to get more and more quiet—or maybe they're just harder to hear. Sure, a typo here, some inconsistent spelling there; these don't really rise to the level of "bugs" since nothing's technically broken. But when these little things accumulate, they can start to chip away at the users' trust in the product and the company. Curious to know, how are others tackling this within their teams? #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamCollaboration #QualityAssurance

15

Welcome Mitwa Patel to join Seradex as a co-op Software Developer in the spring/summer of 2024. During her tenure, she'll be working on converting Crystal reports to Telerik reports and adding test cases to QA automated testing for Windows-based ERP application. The new redesign report will remove imperfections, improve usability, and Seradex branding. The new test cases will be integrated into TestComplete which will be triggered by Azure DevOps pipeline. This integration will significantly reduce our manual testing timeline and inform any bugs to the developers immediately after auto-build and auto-deployment are completed. #ReportConversion #DataVisualization #QAautomation #AzureDevOps #TestComplete #ContinuousDevelopment #ContinuousIntegration

22

3 Comments

I rarely post on LinkedIn, but I'm curious to find some folks to chat with about some ideas for an Enterprise Product Management product. My thesis is that the current suite of tools do not do a sufficient job providing features for managing sprawling, complex suites of products + product lines that mature tech organizations maintain. Most PM products are geared toward startups and smaller companies with simpler products, but few tools help PMs and other leaders manage the sprawling complexity of a situation like 30 products over 6 product lines, 14 industry solutions, and components from a dozen acquisitions. Let me know if you'd be down to chat for 20 minutes one day about it!

23

2 Comments

From all the nerds (like me) to everyone trying to figure out how to deal with us, here's a tip: please don't treat asynchronous communication the same way you would a live conversation. Give me all the information upfront so I can respond with what you need when I have a moment. If I get a "Hello Nick" in Slack... I might just ignore you until you give me the full context. I will definitely ignore you if I'm in a flow state. There are two types of communication: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous Communication: This is your phone call, virtual meeting, or in-person chat (remember those?). It's like a tennis match when done right: listen, respond, listen, respond... Asynchronous Communication: This includes emails, direct messages, texts, etc. Think of it as a book: you can put it down and pick it up later. Or not at all. Platforms like Slack, Teams, and Google Chat are all about async communication. When done right, it's a fantastic way to collaborate. Make the most of it by being clear, concise, and most importantly, complete in sending messages.

14

6 Comments

Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

12

1 Comment

🚀 Exciting times at Captain - we're launching an agency white label solution that's a game-changer for service-based businesses! Now, agencies and consultants can offer a top-tier, self-serve content marketing solution, fully branded as their own. 🎨 I've witnessed firsthand the struggle of agencies trying to scale their offerings, and this new tool is a dream come true. Imagine delivering cutting-edge content marketing services under your brand, without the heavy lifting of developing the tech from scratch. That's the power we're handing over to you. 🛠️ What's more, setting your own pricing puts you in the driver's seat of your revenue model. And the best part? It's so simple to set up, you could be offering this to your clients in minutes, not months. ⏱️ Richard McBeath, the CEO at Captain, is right to be excited. This move aligns perfectly with Captain's vision of empowering brands through smart content marketing. Now, that power is in your hands. 💡 As a software engineer, I'm pumped about the tech that makes this possible. We're talking about a seamless, intuitive platform that's going to make your agency indispensable to your clients. And as for the bottom line? Let's just say, the sky's the limit for recurring revenue. 💸 Agencies, it's time to level up. #ContentMarketing #AgencyLife #WhiteLabel #BrandGrowth #MarketingTech #Innovation #SaaS

6

🚀 Tired of flying blind when it comes to company spending? I’ve got great news! Airbase just launched spend analytics to give you high-definition on-demand visibility into company spend. You’ll see spend by vendor, department, subsidiary, project, and more to surface savings opportunities and areas for process improvement. Make smarter decisions faster with better analytics. We’ve also enhanced our Vendor Management capabilities to build better relationships with vendors. DM me if you’d like to learn more. 📊

11

I've been hearing a lot about "the end of the Jr Developer" lately and how no one should take software engineering anymore. Sure, the market is a bit of a mess right now with lots of layoffs and a bias toward hiring senior developers but what happens in 10 years when those senior devs are retiring or moving into managerial roles? It's the same with anything, if you aren't training the next generation of developers you are heading for a crisis sooner rather than later. We are trading short term gains for long term pain. AI might be steering use towards another dotcom or crypto style bubble but software development isn't going anywhere and ChatGPT isn't going to take any of our jobs. #softwaredevelopment #ai #softwareengineer

19

14 Comments

Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

4

My love/hate with Amazon continues. Looking to buy a power strip and half the products have reviews like "Caught fire," "nearly burned down my house," "scorched my outlet," "broke after 2 months"... but next day shipping be like 😍 ^^ Posted by me to Facebook, February 2020 Sometimes all you need to beat your competition is to be faster: faster to get into the hands of consumers, faster to release new features, faster to respond to support tickets. You can have a worse product but win on “SPEED”. * McDonald’s is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise partially because their “fast food” was so much faster (and consistent) compared to the competition. * Amazon shopping is HUGE because of 2-day shipping. * Instant downloads/instant streaming have completely taken over software, video games, and media consumption. If you’re looking for business ideas, take an existing product or business and make it “faster”.

3

1 Comment

Latest q2 software engineering comp report (accepted offers) is out and it's a doozy. Please DM or email me natan@singlesprout.com for the data. Overall trends: - compensation is up big in q2 - companies hiring more for seniority - in-office requirements continue to rise ... and much more

17

1 Comment

Had a conversation about being a zero-inboxer, and thought I'd share my strategies for maintaining a "zero" inbox. 1. "Zero" means non-scrollable inbox. There's no way I'll ever have a truly empty inbox. 2. Treat emails left in the inbox as a todo list. These should be relatively quick hit items that you can get to when you have a bit of free time. 3. If something will take longer than 15 minutes, schedule a blocker on your calendar with the title of the email, and archive the email. When the calendar item comes up, go find the email, and complete the task. (Some systems will let you turn emails into calendar items - do that if possible.) 4. Don't end the day with a scrollable inbox. If it's still scrollable, make calendar items and archive. 5. Once it's done, archive it (don't delete). Be done with it. Let the archive be your knowledge base. 6. Create rules to tuck away any emails which are things you may need to reference later but aren't actually important on a day-to-day basis (like many emails from DLs). 7. Minimal folders. Really. I find folders just make it harder to find emails, and then I need to make decisions on which folder I should put an item into. I used to do "virtual" folders (ones based on search), but found they didn't really help. Which leads me to... 8. Become good at search. It's much easier to craft a search string than it is to poke around at which folder might have an email. 9. Archive old emails after returning from a break lasting longer than a week. (I've talked about this in the past) 10. Don't be afraid to declare email bankruptcy. If you have 1,500 emails in your inbox, it's time to admit you're never going to get to them. Archive them and start fresh. You'll literally never dig out of a hole like that. If it's really important, they'll email again. And if they haven't, and it's been more than 3 weeks, I think everyone has already admitted the task involved in the email (even if it's just replying) isn't happening and has moved on.

17

5 Comments

Please repost to spread the word. IF YOU ARE HIRING A DEVELOPER RELATIONS PERSON TO REPORT TO MARKETING, YOU'RE MAKING A MISTAKE. My name is Scott, I'm a Community Mentor in the worldwide Developer Relations Discord, "Captains of Community". Here's the reality: Sorry about the caps but this is a real pain point and hiring managers need to know. Developer Advocates, Developer Program Engineers, and Developer Relations Engineers should never report to Marketing. This is because Marketing tries to twist DevRel people into salespeople, with KPIs centered on website activity, signups and conversions. This is NOT DevRel, it is Developer Marketing and that's a whole different discipline. DevRel (as opposed to Developer Marketing) has KPIs centering around making the developer happier with the product, and keeping a finger on the pulse of your users. It involves writing tutorials, answering questions in forums or Slack/Discord, giving talks and speaking to people at conferences in order to collect the pain points and wants of developers in relation to the product, and write reports on them. It involves trying to push the engineering team into doing what users want, sometime putting them at odds. It means being the face of the product and the person developers know they can turn to if they have a problem. It does not involve signups, conversions, or any other kind of marketing metric. In fact, all DevRel people need to report to either Engineering at a small/medium size company, or to a dedicated DevRel Director at a larger one. And no, that director should not report to a Marketing VP. Hopefully this will help you not make a bad hire, or waste someone else's time by hiring them for a job that isn't actually same as the job title you advertised. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and best of luck! Scott Stoll

7

By choosing Dropbox, you not only save time but also enhance your team's collaboration capabilities and provide effortless access to your most important files. 🏆According to a Principled Technologies study conducted in 2023, Dropbox outperformed its competitors in 289 out of 336 comparisons of file uploading, downloading, and syncing. Dive into the findings at the link below.

1

Harry Ronchetti has just shipped a complete do-over of Vizzly's Theme API docs! 👏 Documentation plays such an important role in building a first class developer experience, and it's deceptively hard to do! I'm excited to see what beautiful, custom-themed dashboards this update will help to create! https://lnkd.in/eKVCuqPd #docs #dashboard #customize

13

1 Comment