FOSSA Engineering - Q4 2018

Introduction

This document discusses some of the challenges our engineering team is thinking about on a day-to-day basis. We don't need you to have solutions to all (or any) of these challenges. This document is only to help you learn more about what we're thinking about. If you find something here that piques your interest, come ask us about it! We'd love to have a discussion about these topics.

Categories

From prototype to production-ready

All startups begin by building prototypes, starting with an MVP to raise money and moving to an SRP to close the first sale. This engineering process qualitatively changes when you begin building real customer traction. Now, we need to transition from “move fast and break things” to “move fast with scale”.

• How do we prioritize refactoring against the need to iterate on features?
• When, if ever, do we make major architecture changes? What factors go into that decision? What common changes have you seen, and how have they worked out?
• Have you ever done a rewrite? A language migration? A major database schema migration? How have those worked?
• Have you lived the MVP-to-production process? What are your insights on this process?

Building excellent engineering teams

Having a transparent, safe, and candid culture is extremely important to our team. We want to cultivate a trusting environment where team members feel like they can do their best work, and build a process for growing our team that is good for both us and our candidates.

• How do engineering teams evolve as they grow larger? As the business grows larger?
• When does it make sense to add process to engineering and project management? How do we evaluate whether a process is effective?
• How do we discover, attract, recruit, and mentor great engineers?
• How do we maintain a culture of openness, transparency, and safety as our team grows?

Designing great developer experiences

We solve deeply technical challenges and integrate with deeply technical developer tools. Build and dependency management systems are often notorious for obscure failure modes, unhelpful error messages, and complex operation. Despite this, we are committed to shipping an excellent product and building delightful user experiences.

• What are the best (and worst) developer tools you've worked with?