The Day-1 Decisions that Make or Break Companies w/ PlanetScale's CEO Sam Lambert
Your early tech stack decisions won’t ensure long term success, but they can certainly set you up for long term failure.
Pragmatists rejoice! This week’s episode of Dev Interrupted features Sam Lambert, CEO & President of PlanetScale, a tech leader known as the ‘Oracle of Pragmatism’.
In a winding conversation that touches on Sam’s time at GitHub, where he helped the then 40th most-trafficked website in the world run on just 2 servers, to his experience working at Facebook where he learned that you don’t need to sacrifice quality in order to move fast, this episode has the insights you need to make straightforward, no BS decisions about your tech stack.
Or as Sam says, learn how to avoid “the new hotness” in order to build a culture that reflects the often boring decisions that make or break a company.
“We all use those products that start off being amazing. When the company is like five developers, just building what makes sense to them. And they grow up and through failures of leadership, they just end up with bloated product teams of people that don't understand the work of developers who are allowed to boss around ‘their’ engineers.”
Episode Highlights Include:
(2:18) Lessons in pragmatism from GitHub
(6:49) Sam's experience at Facebook
(10:40) Moving fast without sacrificing quality
(17:12) Building teams that are passionately pragmatic
(26:07) Why people are scared of their database
(29:19) What is the serverless movement?
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