This guide might be helpful in working with me.
Career Bio
You can find more information on LinkedIn, but TL;DR is:
- I interned at Stripe
- I was an early engineer at Heap Analytics
- I was the CTO of eAgronom, a great product-led agritech startup
This background gives me a uniquely powerful perspective on what we need and how to build a great analytics tool.
What I work on, goals
Some of my past and ongoing projects here include:
- Building out session recording
- Modernizing posthog-js
- Speeding up data ingestion
- Getting our clickhouse helm charts production-ready
- Improving query performance
As an engineer, I'm a generalist - I enjoy throwing myself at impactful and difficult core issues and chewing through them in a systematic way from first principles.
Goal-wise, I am focused in becoming a better IC/engineer by:
- Shipping lots of hard, tricky projects
- Finding lenses through which to make complicated problems easy
- Improving my communication around tricky issues
- Creating something fundamentally useful and amplifications and maintaining it
- Empowering the people around me to make great decisions
Personality and quirks
- I am both self-deprecating and humble in person. I honestly think all adults are just faking it :)
- I am very direct in my written word, it can sound harsh.
- This also known as the Estonian style of communication.
- I both assume and hope I'm attributed good intent - the goal is to provide clear and actionable feedback, not punish.
- Please always push back if you disagree with what I'm saying or see a better or more pragmatic path forward. There are always multiple paths forward!
- I really value tight feedback loops. Being wrong and making lots of mistakes is in my opinion the only way to learn.
- I will ask you about "What did you learn from X" since it's a good framing device for learning.
- I care deeply about getting things done
- I will try to offer alternatives and other potential solutions
- I'll call you out if I see work flows that don't work, e.g. huge pull requests or not leveraging feature flags
- I'll call you out for lack of testing/clarity/expectation setting on your pull requests
- I don't know what's valuable to document vs not. I rely heavily on people around me to set that context.
- I use a well-oiled Linux machine and stay well away from Apple hardware and software.
- I have a small child and try to set clear and strict boundaries between work and personal life. Meetings with US-based I'll try to schedule to be early in your day (e.g. 9 or 10am East Coast).
- I care deeply about the well-being of people in our team - take care of yourself, this is a marathon not a sprint.
How I can help you
- I have broad context into everything to do with engineering and product.
- Happy to provide input into why and what we're building product-wise, help scope projects and talk about prioritization.
- I can provide guidance around how to get quickly started with any unfamiliar codebase, around tricky refactors, testing and minimizing risk shipping huge changes.
- I have years of experience with optimizing team workflows and trying to be as productive as possible. I might have a few tips to share!
- I am always happy to review your code or just chat about anything
How to reach me: just send a message in slack proposing a time to chat :)
How you can help me
- Provide me feedback - the more and more raw, the better
- Call me out on being wrong - I'm still learning!
- I love working with people who are better than me in certain areas - I love to pair and pick up tricks and tips.