Recent articles
This year I contributed two articles to “real” publications (as opposed to this blog, that is). I had not done that before; I’d like to do more of it if my schedule and editors’ appetites allow.
David Noël-Romas’ Blog
Hey! Thanks for checking out my blog. I'm a staff-level software engineer who works remotely at Stripe. Prior to that, I owned a small local business and worked as the CTO in a 30-person startup. Outside of my day job, I enjoy playing music, brewing beer, and building [Tabby Data](https://www.tabbydata.com).
Latest posts
Tabby
A while ago I wrote Data practices for scrappy startups and it’s been rolling around in my head ever since. Why can’t tiny startups have simple data tools that can grow with them?
Announcing StaffEng: the podcast
Whew! I can’t believe it’s been months since my last post, and that this is my first post this year, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been busy!
Going big
I once read this book which I can’t hugely recommend because it’s a lot of business BS but it contained one insight which has stuck with me ever since: the actual effort required of an individual to do good work doesn’t change that much with scope or scale. That sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it: the day-to-day effort expended by Elon Musk is not an order of magnitude greater than the…
Embedded analytics
[Note: This is a cross-post from over at tabbydata.com.]
Using AWS Cloud9 for browser-based development
I’ve been working on a side project recently, related to this other blog that I started a few weeks back. (The project isn’t ready to share quite yet, but you might be able to guess what I’m working on from those posts!)
On writing in an engineering context
Even though I’m not convinced that working in public is always useful, I am absolutely certain that being a prolific and also fairly decent (in that order) writer is always useful as an engineer.
Data practices for scrappy startups
After writing this post, I was inspired to write more about the topic and spun up a new site around it. Head over to www.tabbydata.com to learn more!
Can COVID accelerate the exportation of Silicon Valley?
When I started my current job, I was seeking refuge from my failed bootstrapped startup. We had a product, we had customers, but we didn’t have growth. (In theory, that is ok for a bootstrapped startup! The full story involves a slew of other major mistakes on my part, but that’s for another day.)
Scaling impact
The business world, and especially the tech world, seeks (at least purportedly) to measure people by their “impact.” The idea is that, if we could successfully quantify the individual impact of every person in an organization, and then reward and promote (or punish and demote!) them accordingly, we would achieve collective enlightenment, crossing a threshold into the nirvana of meritocracy.