Frequently in my career, my manager and I have received flak because I work ‘too much.’ The tech industry is terrified of burnout (with good reason). And it’s true, I’ll work seven days a week if I have the time. However, in reality I spend less time working than most…

“Use technologies and frameworks that you know” is one of my values in Practices to rapidly ship new software products as an engineer. Engineers love to learn. We love to explore new ideas and tools that we haven’t encountered before. …

Throughout my tenure as an engineer, people always seem surprised at how quickly my teams have been able to ship new products. I’ve noticed a number of consistent patterns that work. I’ve broken them into 4 categories: engineering practices, working with partners and stakeholders, engineering team skills, and individual skills…

Over the past ~8 months, I’ve been working on Pet Story, a mobile app that allows pet caregivers to generate a Facebook-like feed for their clients. We applied to the Y Combinator (summer 2019) and were invited for an interview. We unfortunately were not accepted, but it was an insightful…

Note: this is just the raw application that we submitted to Y Combinator for the Summer 2019 cohort. We were accepted for an interview. Actual discussion can be found in the following blog post. Company name: Pet Story Company url, if any: https://petstory.app If you have a demo, what’s the…

Understanding Django’s static files is a bit confusing. There is certainly quite a bit of documentation and variables out there, so I’m writing this for my future self. The important file here is the settings.py file that every Django project has. We’ll dig into DEBUG, STATIC_ROOT, STATIC_URL, and STATICFILES_DIRS. DEBUG This…

The Startup Grind Global conference occurred this past week, and as with any conference I attend, here are some of my personal notes. How to measure growth — Rory O’Driscoll Too many KPI’s adds unnecessary complexity. There are four things that really matter: revenue growth, sales efficiency, revenue churn, and…

SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial for any site in today’s world, especially if you intend to be discovered organically through searches. I’m no expert at SEO, but luckily there are plenty of resources such as Google’s own SEO Starter Guide. Using “Fetch as Google” The first thing I wanted to see was how…

Luckily I’ve created a site that does this for you: https://www.shouldiusethispackage.com/ The Javascript world is filled with countless open source packages. Which is amazing, but is a double edged sword. Using the wrong package can create issues and cost significant amounts of time. …