unethical blogger

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on how to "Be a Libor", trying to codify a few points I feel like I learned about building a successful engineering team at Slide. Shortly after the post went live, I discovered that Libor had been promoted to CTO at Slide.

Over coffee today Libor offered up some finer points on the post in our discussion about building teams. It is important, according to Libor, to maintain a "mental framework" within which the stack fits; guiding decisions with a consistent world-view or ethos about building on top of the foundation laid. This is not to say that you should solve all problems with the same hammer, but rather if the standard operating procedure is to build small single-purpose utilities, you should not attack a new problem with a giant monolithic uber-application that does thirty different things (hyperbole alert!).

Libor also had a fantastic quote from the conversation with regards to approaching new problems:

Just because there are multiple right answers, doesn't mean there's no wrong answers

Depending on the complexity of the problems you're facing there are likely a number of solutions but you still can get it wrong, particularly if you don't remain consistent with your underlying mental framework for the project/organization.

As usual my discussions with Libor are interesting and enjoyable, he's one of the most capable, thoughtful engineers I know, so I'm interested to see the how Slide Engineering progresses under his careful hand as the new CTO. I hope you join me in wishing him the best of luck in his role, moving from wrangling coroutines, to herding cats.

God speed mooncat

I reflect occasionally on how I've gotten to where I am right now, specifically to how I made the jump from "just some kid at a Piggly Wiggly in Texas" as Dave once said, to the guy who knows stuff about things. I often think about what pieces of the Slide engineering environment were influential to my personal growth and how I can carry those forward to build as solid an engineering organization at Apture.

The two pillars of engineering at Slide, at least in my naive world-view, were Dave and Libor. I joined Dave's team when I joined Slide, and I left Libor's team when I left Slide. Dave ran the client team, and did exceptionally well at filling a void that existed at Slide bridging engineering prowess with product management. Libor often furrowed his brow and built some of the large distributed systems that gave Slide an edge when dealing with incredible growth. In my first couple years I did my best to emulate Dave, engineers would always vie for Dave's time, asking questions and working through problems until they could return to their desk with the confidence that they understood the forces involved and solve the task at hand. Now that I'm at Apture, I'm trying to emulate Libor.

(Note: I do not intend to idolize either of them, but cite important characteristics)

To understand the Libor role, the phrase "the buck stops here" is useful. A Libor is the end of the line for engineering questions, unlike some organizations the "question-chain-of-command" is not the same as the org-chart. If a problem or question progressed up the stack to a Libor, and between an engineer and a Libor the pair cannot solve the problem, you're screwed.

What does it take to be a Libor you may be thinking:

Dear Slide, I luv u guys, srsly. kthxbai.

Photo credit: Meghan

See parts 1, 2 and 3

My journey at Slide comes to an end today, when I leave this evening I will once again return to being a free agent (if only for two days). Some of my coworkers have casually referred to my writings over the past few days of my "memoirs", which isn't too far off to be honest. When I leave Slide this evening, my employment will have accounted for roughly 10% of my entire life and 50% of my adult life. Writing my side of the story down, to some extent, has been more about telling a story to myself and less about telling it to anybody else (apologies). So much of my time spent at Slide has been in a state of controlled choas that at times it's hard for me to remember when things were done, who was doing them and the order in which they happened.

The two questions I've invariably gotten since I gave my notice and subsequently started writing this series of posts have been: why are you leaving and where are you going? My reasons for leaving are irrelevant, I will say that if I could take the people I've been working with at Slide with me, I would. I've learned such an incredible amount from those that I've worked with, both technical and non-technical, while at Slide. Whenever I would pitch friends on the idea of joining Slide, my take-home point was always "when you join Slide, you will not be the smartest person there." I feel lucky that I was given the opportunity to "come of age" as a young engineer in a company of so many tremendously talented individials, given the chance for a do-over, I would still play my cards the way I've played them. I joined Slide a punk kid from Texas, I'm leaving Slide a slightly-more-learned punk kid from Texas.

As to where I am going, after an extended vacation of Saturday and Sunday, I will be joining my second startup ever (Slide's a pretty good first time out) on Monday. When I started looking at other companies I had a couple of criteria, I wanted to join a smaller team (Slide's upwards of a hundred people or so) and I had to really like who I would be working with. Tristan, Jesse, Can (John) and the team from Apture fit both criteria. I'm not going to go into detail about what I'm really going to be doing there or where Apture is going as a company. I will say that after two and a half years of working and studying at Slide, I'm looking forward to employing what I've learned and continuing my education at Apture.

See you on the beaches of the world.

Continuing on from part 1 and part 2

Prior to joining Slide, a friend of mine "whurley" had nicknamed me the "Angry Young Man" which I promptly put on my first set of business cards (my current business cards list my title as "Meta-Chief Platform Architect, Enterprise Edition", I received them after mentioning a failed poaching attempt by LinkedIn to Max); when Top Friends went dark on Facebook, I was a little more than an "angry young man."

Given my close involvement with the product, the amount of sleepless nights working on it, the actions against Top Friends felt personal to me, regardless of the posturing between Slide and Facebook's executives. As hours turned into days offline, it became clear to me that the suspension of the application was far less about our privacy hole and far more about Facebook making an example out of Top Friends to the rest of the platform development community. The message was heard loud and clear by the majority of the developers that I knew, this is not your platform, these are not your users and you will play by our rules or we will wipe you from the face of the site. Building on the platform was not only no more fun, it was also a risky business decision.

At the time of the suspension, Keith and I had already started discussing what a "TopFriends.com" might look like, as the signals of platform instability for applications were already being sent.

When I finished up writing part 1 of my journey at Slide yesterday, I had just recounted becoming "the Top Friends guy", savvy readers might have noted that I had not moved off of Dave's couch at the time. I am uncertain whether it is a record to be proud of, but I held the position of "the guy on Dave's couch" for two months. With the leadup to the "F8" conference I didn't have a whole lot of time to find an apartment, Dave being an all around nice guy and amazing cook, wasn't helping my motivation to leave either. That said, I'm a delightful house guest, honest.

Shortly after the initial successes of the Top Eight product, and the launch of "FunWall" (renamed "FunSpace" later), Slide quickly converted the desktop client team to the "Facebook Team" with 4-5 engineers hacking on Facebook applications to capitalize as quickly as possible on the wild-west nature of the platform at the time. We subsequently launched another couple apps, such as "My Questions" an application that allowed you to poll your friends (likely our most "useful" application). I ended up writing another application alongside Top Eight called "Fortune Cookie", contrasted to My Questions, it was probably our most useless application. The application was absolutely brilliant (Mike and Max get credit here again), the profile box for the application was a picture of a fortune cookie with a fortune overlaid. Brilliant.