November 2021 Summaries

A couple of months ago, the author joined a new startup remotely, invited by Dor Sasson, with the aim of building a "Dev First" company both internally and externally. Internally, this involves investing in stable pipelines, processes, and internal tools to enhance development experiences, instead of prioritizing speed at the expense of efficiency and product quality. Externally, it focuses on developing products with user-friendly APIs, comprehensive documentation, and flawless usability to delight developers who integrate with their tools. As an example of their "Dev First" approach, the team started building their initial CI/CD pipelines using GitHub actions and Octopus for environment variable management. They faced the challenge of efficiently propagating environment variables to local development environments and decided to develop an internal CLI tool to automate this process rather than resorting to manual updates, demonstrating the company's commitment to their core values and engineering culture.