Modern Staff Engineering at a Startup
Hello! 👋
I transcribed my talk from DevOps Days Birmingham AL 2024 to a blog post. In this talk, I share how I adapted the engineering principles I have learned over my career to the startup environment. ✨
Modern Staff Engineering at a Startup ~ chadxz.dev
Exploring how startup culture shapes the application of DevOps principles as well as Staff and Platform Engineering techniques.
What’s going on
Over the summer I took a trip with my family to France and Switzerland and really soaked up the beauty and culture. The mountains of Switzerland were especially breathtaking. If you have never been to Switzerland, put it on your bucket list!
Lately at work I’ve been learning a lot about temporal.io as we migrate some of our workflows into it. Building business logic in their durable workflows model is a mental shift that takes a while to fully sink in. At its core it is a workflow orchestration tool with strong reliability guarantees. I have been challenging myself to think about business workflows based on the transactionality I expect and where I want retries to happen.
I’ve also been massively interested in AI tooling over the past few months. I’m a Jetbrains user, so my tool of choice in WebStorm so far has been a combination of supermaven.com for tab completion and continue.dev for inline prompting and code chat. I have Claude Sonnet 3.5 hooked to Continue via API key and am able to get high-quality AI assistance for a fraction of the cost of these $20/month subscriptions. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to build something at work with these APIs and have been looking for a good side project to practice on.
Let me know what you think of the article!
Whether you enjoy the article or not, do let me know what you think! You can reply to this email or join the conversation on LinkedIn or Bluesky. Feel free to DM me, too.
Peace ✌️,
~Chad