The aim of a development group is to build business value. Building technical leverage is the focus on increasing the business value a development group delivers over time.| lethain.com
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.| stripe.com
Planning the work for infrastructure engineering organization can be a challenge, in part due to a lack of clarity around what such an organization contributes value to the company it operates within. I have thoughts, and a simple thinking aid, for that.| lethain.com
I’ve come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams| lethain.com
Technical infrastructure is never complete. System processes can always run with less overhead or be bin-packed onto fewer machines. Data can be retrieved more quickly and stored at a cheaper cost per terabyte. System design can broaden the gap between failure and user impact. Transport layers can be more secure.| lethain.com
Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. Many of the infrastructure engineer teams I’ve been a part of have struggled to make the transition from maintenance to innovation, and I wanted to write down some of the ideas that we’re exploring to ease this shift.| lethain.com
As an organization grows beyond fifty people or so, you’ll feel a building pressure to add a third layer of management, and eventually you will. This ought to be a benign event, what’s the difference between supporting some managers and supporting their managers? It shouldn’t be too different, but for me it was when my previous mechanisms of alignment stopped working very well. Two of the most effective tools I’ve found are strategy and vision documents, and this post introduces how t...| lethain.com
We’re creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and enterprises to build products, implement new business models, and grow globally. And we want you to help.| stripe.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why migrations are so important, and also how to run them effectively.| lethain.com