May 2023 Summaries

Our company, Railway, is an infrastructure provider that offers instant application deployments to developers. We've written a new blog post titled "How We Work" which updates our previous version and shares lessons learned since then. We've doubled down on remote work, emphasizing the importance of clear boundaries, strong alignment, and autonomy. Our team operates with minimal recurring meetings, using Discord for internal comms, and prioritizing real work over meta work. We've also codified our commitment to craft, which means delivering high-quality software that exceeds user expectations. Our goal is to support 1B developers with a team of ≤ 100, leveraging autonomy and direct responsibility individuals (DRIs) to own tasks from start to finish. We promote autonomy through tools like quarterly planning, Daily Wraps, and async nonblocking workflows, which enable employees to work independently while maintaining strong collaboration and communication. By protecting principles like autonomy, leverage, craft, and remote work, we aim to deliver the best product possible for our users.

We replaced Twin with vanilla Tailwind in our monorepo, resulting in significant performance improvements, reduced dependencies, and better development experience (DX) for our team. We initially used Twin due to its ease of use and support for styled-components, but as our monorepo grew, we encountered issues with Babel's slow build times and compatibility problems with newer runtimes like SWC. After migrating to Tailwind, we saw pages load in under 1 second, compared to multiple seconds previously, and enjoyed benefits such as IDE extensions, the Tailwind playground, and easier debugging of styles. The migration required modifying over 400 components across 30 pull requests, but we were able to tackle it progressively, learning along the way and addressing precedence issues that arose during the process.