EDIT: This post stays here for posterity.

I’m looking for my next opportunity. Ideally, the company is in San Francisco. I’m open to remote work, but I’d much rather participate with a team directly. Here are some thoughts on what this next role looks like.

The Company

The ideal company has a fairly direct line between software shipped and revenues generated. I’m not against other business strategies, I just prefer a direct product-to-revenue approach (e.g., SAAS over social media).

The Culture

Note that when I say “culture” I mean how a company does its work. Culture is not perks, like free lunches or company values. Perks and values are important. However, how a company does its work is critical to success. See: Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

The right culture is important to me. In software development, culture will make or break an organization, especially in startups.

A good engineering culture looks similar to this…

• A development process that mandates transparency (think pull requests).
• Automated (or mostly-automated) deployments that treats system changes as part of the event stream.
• Frequent, small, and low-risk deployments.
• Testing discipline that values confidence over coverage.
• An operations process that treats configuration as development (DevOps).
• Product and Engineering collabarate as distinct skill-sets, but one team.

A broader company-wide culture looks like…

• Company success is made up of team, not individual, accomplishments.
• All work is defined by the value that it creates. Developing software is about solving problems more so than building solutions.
• See the needle, move the needle. Further to solving problems, value should be measurable. I believe in the tenets of The Lean Startup.
• There are no silos. Critical business information is transparent and available to all.

The Role

I’ve spent most of my career working for startups. As a result, I’m able to wear many hats, especially in small organizations. I can hire and manage new employees. I can help with the development of the product Roadmap. I can work with support to help customers through problems. While I am looking for a technical role, I have no problem doing all the other work that needs to be done.

At a high-level, I’m a full-stack Rails developer. I can manage all aspects of the Rails stack, from product features, to deployment automation, to infrastructure provisioning. My skills are largely around the backend of development. I am not a designer. While I can build a UI that works, I am not the developer that will make the UI awesome.

I’ve can also do a number of specialized things. Too many to list here, my resume has more details. Even more importantly, I’m ready to learn new things.

I tend towards a team-lead role. I’m fairly outspoken, although I do follow the rule of: “strong opinions, loosely held.” I definitely love to mentor less experienced developers, and help them level-up their skills.

The Learning Experience

The greatest thing of personal value to me is learning new things. There are two areas, specifically, that I would really like to learn more about.

Marketing and growth analytics. Sure, call this “growth-hacking”, if you want. I’m interested in learning more about it, and collaborating with a marketing team to execute growth strategies.

Quantitative analysis. Sure, call this “big-data”, if you want. I would like to expand my skills around statistics, and learn more about the programming paradigms in that space.

Contact me

If your team is expanding, and I look interesting, please get in touch. You can reach me at [email protected].

A note to recruiters: If you contact an employer regarding me without my explicit permission, I will not work with you.