Introduction
- What is a tech startup?
- Different roles in a Tech startup
- What is my role
Day-to-day life
- Normal Day
- 1-3 meetings not bunched together well
- split time between meetings for checking status on projects and setting myself up for better deep work time when meetings end
- First check what I can unblock others from
- if there are any questions for me
- if anyone is waiting on something from other teams that I can help push through
- if people don’t have tasks*
- Most startup developers are good at finding things to do even when nothing is directly assigned
- Short 2-3 hour of deep work
- Programming
- Spec/doc creation
- Fulfilling data requests
- Meeting/Sync day
- One day a week is usually dedicated to have all product syncs
- These product syncs are usually the PM, QA, Design and Engineer all planning out the weekly sprint/cycle and talking about any future plans that might impact current timelines
- Each product gets 1 sync so the more products, the more syncs
- Meetings can go from 4-6 hours these days as I also usually have a leadership sync and sometimes 1 on 1’s with my team
- The other time is mostly spent updating docs with whatever came out of the previous meetings
- Deep work days
- We have at least one no (or low meeting) day a week where we can focus on tasks that require a ton of time and focus without distraction
- For myself I usually still will have 1 meeting and spend time answering questions and unblocking the team but I do get a solid 4-5 hour chunk of deep work time
- heavy programming tasks
- deep architecture docs
- system design for upcoming products
- Deployment days
- Usually only impacts the engineers of the product that is being deployed
- Lots of pre deployment smoke testing
- Go through deployment checklist
- Kickoff deployment
- done by merging pull request into main branch
- Monitor deployment
- Keep an eye on Vercel dashboard
- Keep an eye on Coolify dashboard
- Post deployment monitoring
- Check logs
- Keep an eye on slack automated monitoring channels
- Check up on discord
- This process can take 2-8 hours depending on the size of deployment so sometimes eats up an entire day for an engineer
- Other engineers are on standup for support but mostly working on their regular tasks so for them it’s a normal day
- I typically keep a close eye on everything to help with mitigation if anything comes up
Adhoc Challenges
- Outages
- DDoS attacks
- Internal employee conflicts
- Deployments [ might move to a day to day up top]
- On call
Related Episodes
How to support the show
Patreon
Prices subject to change and are listed in USD
- Support the show from as little as ~$1/month
- Get a shoutout at the end of the episode (while supplies last) for just ~$3/month
- Help support the HTML All The Things Podcast: Click Here
Scrimba Discount - Coding Courses!
Learn to code using Scrimba with their interactive follow-along code editor.
Join their exclusive discord communities and network to find your first job!
Use our affiliate link for a 20% discount!!
- Click the link to take you to the Scrimba site
- A pop-up should appear on your screen with the discount amount and instructions on how to claim it
- Discount is for new accounts only
We receive a monetary kickback if you use our affiliate link and make a purchase.
