Crystal Billy

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.

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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!

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🔍 We're hiring again at Centaur Labs which means I'm reviewing lots of applications... a process I actually enjoy! One thing I'm noticing is most cover letters don't mention anything about the company and what we're working on, E.g.: "Dear sir, I'm excited to apply to the React Engineer position. I have X years of experience as a front-end developer and I'm an expert in Typescript. I'm looking forward to learning more!" 💌 My advice is to do some research on the company you're applying for, then write a blurb on why your unique blend of skills, experience, and attitude is a great fit for THIS role at THIS company. A thoughtful cover letter is an easy way to get the hiring manager's attention and increase your odds at an interview. *Edited to add: this advice is very specific to startups, where mission is so important! #interviewingtips #developerjobs

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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!

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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

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Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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Reader feedback for my latest post about how to use AI and my PRD template to never have to write a PRD from scratch again. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/eJjVXJUJ

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My team has been hard at work building the next generation developer experience at Stripe—so proud of them for unveiling a step change for people building on Stripe. Today, we're introducing three big new features: 1) Sandboxes: the next-generation of Stripe test mode. You can *finally* create multiple, isolated environments—handy for building a new feature, or just playing around with something new safely. 2) Workbench: our reimagined developer space, available everywhere in the Stripe dashboard. Inspect anything on the dashboard and get under the hood with the raw JSON in just one click. 3) Event Destinations: our webhook tools are evolving to make it easier to get just the events you need, and now delivering to cloud destinations for the first time. Check out the next generation of Stripe—and get early access—here: https://beta.stripe.dev

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Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

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Video from my recent talk is now available! Learn about how we're building our own developer tools to make frontend engineering fast and fun at Datadog

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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.

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I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete. Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat. Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering. Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your "fastest" engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!

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I've been helping out with some hiring lately and looking at resumes. I'm reminded of something I heard on the Manager Tools podcast years ago: the purpose of a resume is to get an interview. And a lot of resumes I see aren't achieving that purpose. I've seen lots of varied advice over the years on what makes a good resume. And the best I can offer is what I look for when reading resumes for software developer roles. I prefer that it's concise and to the point. I skip past the skill blocks and summaries and go right to the experience. I know that certain recruiting companies - maybe all? - will reformat resumes to their spec and add that stuff in or have the candidate do it. Maybe it's better for search engines or something. I don't really care. Making hiring decisions is the most important part of my job (when I have that input), so I'm going to take the time to do it right, and give the resume the chance to sell me on the candidate. That said, I don't think that the length matters as much these days. It used to be that everyone would advise you to keep it to one page. That's not so much the case anymore. Although I only read roles for the most recent 5-10 years of experience on the resume. I'll skim through the rest. I might read in depth if something catches my eye, but I'm mostly concerned with what someone has done lately. And please, please, please tell me what you've actually done. Tell me what impact you had, what value you delivered, what you accomplished. I don't really care if you built an SPA with React. I do care if you reduced bug count by 50%, decreased TTFB from 1 sec to 100ms, or worked with your team to deliver an in danger project on time. And finally, the more senior a role is, the more leadership and ownership I look for in a resume. If you've been churning out tickets for 20 years, that's less appealing than someone who's gone from writing code to designing whole systems or leading lunch and learns or writing style guides and documentation for the team on top of writing code. Being an experienced anything is less about "doing the work" and more about helping the whole team to work better. Anyway /soapbox. I'm sure some people disagree or have a different perspective. Feel free to yell at me 😄

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I’m hiring our 7th engineer in a team of 10 engineering building a $1B company 💯 What you get joining Stan: 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 Stan helps 60,000+ people make a living and work for themselves. That’s $200M+/year and 📈 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 A team of ~25 built a $30M/year business. All this in the just 3 years since inception! 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 We hire the best people, share our vision with them, and get out of their way. Stan is the place you take ownership of everything you do. What to expect: - Top 1% compensation (cash + equity) - 60hr weeks with people who talk about work at lunch - A long list of things that starts with “I’ve built …” - Seeing the growth of a $1B startup from the inside - Occasional trips between Canada and the US If you’re looking to join a team that can help you grow and bring out the best in you, like this post 👍 and shoot me a DM 📩 #hiring #startup #fullstack #toronto

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