Pull Request: The Laboratory (#1)

Why have a Seller Labs Engineering blog?

The Laboratory, the Seller Labs Engineering blog, is a place for engineers to share problems we’ve solved, tips and tricks for the tools that we use, and what we’re doing lately with new exciting technologies. We’ll use it to celebrate successes, and learn from things that went wrong.

With this blog, we hope to open up some of those conversations to the larger development community, as each of us learns from it almost every day.

Here are a few other companies’ blogs that we’ve loved and hope to take as inspiration:

Scaling Knowledge at Airbnb – Airbnb Engineering & Data Science – Medium Transitioning from a start-up to a growth company; hiring and training and how to do it well. Their point about “knowledge cacophony” is applicable for any kind of documentation and knowledge sharing, not just for data science research.

Taking PHP Seriously – Several People Are Coding (Slack) While we’ve built the backend of a lot of our newer features in Java in the last few years, PHP is still a big part of our success. That rapid “think; edit; reload the page” cycle is so delightful sometimes.

Quantum of Deployment – Code as Craft (Etsy) Making deployments feel seamless and thinking through all the pieces involved in releasing code has been a huge part of our Engineering mission over the past few years as we’ve built a Quality organization. Etsy has been a trailblazer in the CI/CD world with so many good ideas and tips.

Advice for a new executive – Lara Hogan (Etsy) This advice from Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy, to Lara as she moves into a new VP Engineering role at Kickstarter includes this gem:

Even when we did something that didn’t seem directly related to delivering product, it was very much intentionally related. For example, the Code as Craft blog was launched in February 2010 to build a technology brand in the industry so we could hire great people and deliver solid products and infrastructure (and it worked – so many people who joined the team later on came to their interviews already understanding our core culture and how we built things.)

Why Enterprise Software Sucks – Signal v. Noise “The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software.” I will say that I experienced a true sense of joy and delight when I started at Seller Labs and went through an onboarding process using modern HR apps like Gusto and Ease after years of ugly and broken enterprise tools with URLs like http://us.enterprise.jankypayrollsystem.com/asp/u/xtll.htm.