It's happened at least once before

Learning from scars, stumbles, and the occasional triumph in startup land

Back-end geeks will likely grok the Kafka-esque subtext in the name of this blog. Yeah, the other Kafka, the broker guy, not the cockroach guy. Because, well, I am a back-end geek.

It’s catchy. Always a good thing. But there’s something to parse in there beyond delivery semantics. It’s a, well, catchy lede for what I am thinking of rambling about here - tech challenges in early and scale-stage startups. Because whatever challenge (or few) you may be running into, it’s very likely I have run into it… at least once.

See, I’ve spent the last 20+ years in #techstartupland - mostly in fintech (but that’s parenthetical) - but entirely as a geek: a software engineer, an architect, an engineering manager, a tech advisor, angel investor, and particularly, over the last 15+ years, as an early-to-scale-up stage CTO.

That’s a chunk of time to stumble, scratch, burn, recover, get bricked again, recover again. And learn, at every tumble, stumble, topple, slip, pick-your-fall-verb.

The learning never stops.

I may not have too many answers (also pontification is not my thing, nor is prescription), but I sure will enjoy sharing my experience on specific problems which, across my time in tech, I’ve realized are ubiquitous. domain-agnostic, and in most cases, portable… as are some of the remedies that worked for me.

So that’s the idea. To bloviate about (stop me if any of these give you deja-vu) tech debt, engineering culture, offshoring, the infamous “productivity” mystery, strange new-age-y (for me) buzzwords like “full-stack”, stuff like that.

It’s likely you’ve run into at least one of these, at least once.