Having been at startups my entire career, I’ve encountered the dichotomy between speed and scale when building software products.The usual attitude entrepreneurs take when building the first iterations of their products is “...we aren’t anywhere close to facing problems of scale, so let’s worry about that when we get there.” This first version of the software is built and shipped fast, and it’s only a matter of time before engineers realize that they simply don&#8217

Every month, Developer Advocate Aydrian Howard brings together a team of Courier engineers on Courier Live to discuss which updates recently made it into production, what is happening with the features in beta, and what to expect from the product and team in the near future.

Back in early 2018, I embarked on a side gig with a few partners - the idea was to make ridesharing socially engaging and fun. We made a ton of mistakes and never really got the product off the launchpad, however in retrospect, the biggest mistakes we made were wasting precious time in writing code for authentication and authorization as well as user notifications. We learned to focus on customer value the hard way.

Some time back, our engineering leaders suddenly noticed dramatically increased billings from AWS that far outpaced typical benchmarks. The problem turned out to be data insights tools sending an unexpectedly large volume of data. The solution required a deep dive into how AWS billing works and an intricate series of steps to discover the location of the firehose of data.