Why are we not using Cassandra? That was a common question around 2016, right around the crescendo of the Big Data Hype Cycle. We had just come off the high of HDFS and MongoDB, and engineers were seeking the next hot thing to put on their résumés: should it be…

Excerpt from a journal entry at Modern Treasury. At Modern Treasury, we are in the business of building trust. Security is a priority for our customers and key feature of our products. Beyond regular compliance and vendor security assessments, we make an ongoing effort to build in actionable and practical measures for our customers. Here are the most recent examples of our continuing approach to delivering on hardened network security.

(Read Part 2.) Say, we have a SaaS company with gross margins of 60%. For each dollar of revenue, 40¢ is spent producing the product unit, and we keep 60¢ to reinvest in the product. This 60¢ can be spent on activities that deepen the competitive moat: developing new products…

(Read Part 1.) Growth is straightforward: are people buying what we are selling? Following the convention set in Part 1, we will be using product units. Depending on your context, a “product unit” can be a subscription, a license, a ride, a loan, a card, a night’s stay, 1m page…

Or “Finance Wants You to Give a Forecast and What You Can Do About It.” A guide for engineering directors, the occasional engineering manager, and the rare software engineer. Introduction Congratulations! If you are reading this guide, you probably work for a company that has found product-market fit and is starting…

I have been building a security engineering team for the past 9 months. Here are a few things I learned. It is going to be challenging. First, let us acknowledge that security recruiting is hard. It is very very hard, and is possibly the hardest kind of engineering recruiting out there. When I realized that I…

Having worked in a few startups that hired rapidly, I have noticed that there is always this first moment when someone would exclaim that some department can no longer fit in the largest conference room. …

When I first dipped my toes into management, my company and I worked out an arrangement where I was effectively both a tech lead and a manager. (This is also known as a “TLM”). It was a great way to transition myself into a new management role. In hindsight, I…

Co-author: Anuj Desai Anuj and I have had the privilege of working with several teams on their roadmaps and sprint plans over the last few years, and we noticed that it is not always obvious what a healthy backlog should look like, or how it can be maintained. …