Introduction

In early July 2017, through a series of serendipitous events, I found out about a very early stage startup (pre-funding) and went to lunch with the founders, Erik Peterson and Matt Manger, in Faneuil Hall. We connected. I had been dreaming about a startup for a while, so much so that I fell for the "startup-in-a-Fortune-100-company" sales pitch; and while I learned a lot during the 18 month gig at that Fortune 100 company, it was not my dream. Erik and Matt, the dreamer and the operator, had visions of (1) building the best company to work for and (2) designing a product that no company would choose to live without. A few weeks and a code sample later, on July 31st 2017, I joined CloudZero as a Founding Engineer.

First Principles

1. Write Stuff Down
2. Know Yourself
3. Respect Lindy
4. Understand the Domain
5. Code is Liability
6. Don't Break Your Consumers
7. Focus on Flow

NOTA BENE: The rest of this page is a WIP, here is the outline of the sections to come.

Culture

• On Engagement
• On Camaraderie
• On Sharing
  • let others win
  • rotate leads
• On Enabling
• On Visiting the ivory tower
• On Conventions
• On Operations
• On Tradeoffs

Hiring

• Work Samples
• In it Together
• Culture
• Talents vs Knowledge vs Skills

Areas of Expertise

1. Documentation
2. FinOps
3. DevOps
4. Cloud
   1. On Multicloud
   2. On Cloud Tooling
5. Authentication and Authorization
   1. SAML vs OIDC
   2. Federation
   3. Tokens vs Cookies
6. Data
7. Frontend
   1. Static
   2. React + Redux
   3. TypeScript
   4. CSS?
      1. SASS
      2. SCSS
      3. CSS Components
8. Backend
   1. Events, Microservices, Oh My
   2. Serverless vs Kubernetes
   3. APIs
      1. REST
      2. GraphQL
      3. BFF + Public APIs
9. Security
10. Operations
    1. Logging
    2. Maintenance
    3. Reliability