Hasnain says:

"If I had a time machine to go back to 2012 and give myself a few pointers, what would I say?

Lots of little tips, and three big ones. Both boil down to spending a bit more money, to avoid a lot of headaches.

Use managed services for as long as possible. We did ourselves a big disservice by leaving Heroku after only a few months. We should have stayed on it for years - there was so much time wasted managing servers that could have been done for us during critical early days.

Set up a PIT sooner. I should have set up a team of professionals who wanted to work in this space much much earlier. Not in the Heroku days, but once it became untenable as we hit real scale.

Look after yourself just a bit more. For some reason I always found it really hard to prioritise projects that would decrease alerts, simplify oncall, or help me get more sleep. Until suddenly one day I snapped and reallocated a lot of budget to set up the PIT team. Getting decent sleep has many commercial benefits and it’s not selfish to prioritise that over other things the team could work on."

Posted on 2024-02-29T05:35:18+0000