Tired of Just Building Features?
My first job was at a big company. It gave me the comfort of a steady paycheck and a stable pace of life. I had features that I owned, but after a couple years I realized where my career was headed, I was going to be a one-trick pony! Sure the pay was great, but if I didn’t do something immediately to change my situation then I could be laid off with minimal transferable skills.
Fortunately, I thought ahead, and decided to start taking courses at Stanford. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, but I knew areas that my undergraduate curriculum hadn’t covered: graphics, network security, and database design.
The additional coursework kept my mind active and my skills sharp.
Then the worse thing I anticipated happened… I got laid off!
But I wasn’t afraid of finding a new job, and I wanted to find an environment where I could learn more. Where I could have the opportunity to build a complete product. I had that opportunity at my first startup, Mint.com. At Mint I learned pretty much everything I needed to know in order to build a product for the web:
Security
Scalability
Database Design
Front and Back-end Development
Performance Optimizing
Analytics
Various forms of testing: load and performance
Data Warehousing
Integrating with Third Party APIs
Deployment
Managing and Growing Teams
Agile Development Processes
Release Management
However, it took me nearly 4 years to learn it all! But once I was done I was prepared for my next challenge: transitioning from being a founding engineer to a startup founder. I knew what it would take to build a product on my own. And so I set off to build BizeeBee. With BizeeBee I wanted to try new things: I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails to cut down on programming time, incorporate TDD (test driven development) to avoid having to recruit a QA team, and learn how to run a remote team.
Over the past 4 years I’ve learned how to do all of this as well some iOS development too.
While I toyed around with the idea of transitioning to a product manager role, I realized that I would always be a builder, and I also knew there was value in keeping my technical skills sharp!
Overall it’s taken me nearly 8 years to develop and refine all my knowledge of building software products for the web.
