Farhan Thawar: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love this, in part, because it connects to the topic we're talking about, which is speed, velocity, intensity, smaller code base, cleaner, better code base allows you to move faster. I used to be an engineer actually. But, both my engineering brain and my PM brain, I love the idea of killing stuff that's useless, fixing, making code cleaner, and better, and more durable. In reality, very hard for companies to prioritize this thing. Is there anything you found that helps you do that? You mentioned hack days and weeks are one part of that. Probably helps that Toby's an engineer and he understands the value of this stuff. But I guess, for folks that want to do this more, any advice? Yeah. So actually, when we're building something, we think of it in one of three buckets. We're like, "Are you building an experiment, a feature, or infrastructure?" And, once you bucket things, you can say, "Oh, it's an experiment." You're like, "Cool. This is not infra. This is like, we're trying something to learn." And, by the way, that might turn into an experiment or infra, but it starts off as an experiment. Now, if you're building a feature, a feature is basically you're taking advantage of an existing piece of infra, right? So, token gating is the example I gave. If you could now build that in one hour, you would probably say, "Oh, we have the right infra below it." But if you did what Toby does, which is, he's like, "Here's the infra I wish existed. Here's the feature. The feature might be quick to build, but now I have to go and build the infra." You're now slotting yourself into infra land, which is like, that could take longer, but you're now enabling it for a bunch of use cases. You don't have to think about it at once, because you may have people using your API in a different way. So, I think you have to slot yourself. Now, how do people get into this mode? It is super, super hard. And, I would say, Toby is the secret sauce here, because he pushes us to think about things as infra almost all the time. I mean, one of the things that annoys me the most probably is that I'll always come to him and say, "Hey, we can do A or B." And he looks at me and he goes, "You know what I'm going to say, right?" I'm like, "You're going to say go back and generate more options." Because he doesn't like those. "I don't like A or B. Come back when you have something else." Right? Actually, maybe I'll tell you a little anecdote. He has a story where he says, "There are unlimited amount of wrong options for any problem. There's probably 10,000 right options, but everybody stops at the first right one, instead of what you should be spending all your time on, because the options that don't work, you're not going to spend time on. But you have to figure out which of the 10,000 options is the right one and spend time in what are all these right options? Don't just stop at the first one." And so, when I come to and say, "A or B." I'm picking two of the 10,000. And he's like, "That's not what I... Go back and generate more options, because those are not the optimal ones." So, he is quite the philosopher on these things. And it does really change the way the company works, because he'll push you on these things. And then, we over time learn to spot the same patterns. And I learned to push my team on infra, and deleting code, and making things simple, because by the way, who doesn't want to get free stuff? Right? Free performance, free, easy to navigate code base, free maintainability, free resiliency,, because now, we went and did the hard work of deleting. It is hard. But that goes back to the beginning, right? Choose the hard thing. sy to navigate code base, free maintainability, free resiliency,, because now, we went and did the hard work of deleting. It is hard. But that goes back to the beginning, right? Choose the hard thing. Don't just build the feature- The beginning, right? Choose the hard thing. Don't just build the feature, go make the feature easy to build.…

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