People Vs. Processes

Day 353 / 366

The last company where I worked full-time was a US startup named Tophatter. What I loved about that company was how easy it was for a new recruit to start contributing. I was able to push my first change to production on the same day that I joined.

When I decided to start my own company, my vision was something similar. I wanted to create processes so robust that anyone can come in and start working from Day 1. No need for lengthy training periods. No need for anyone shadowing a junior dev for a while to help them out. I want the USP of Blaziken to be these processes.

At other companies that I worked at, things were deployed to production maybe once a week, or even once a month. Every change had to go through a lot of manual and end-to-end testing, the PM as well as the lead would have to personally sign off and then only the changes would get released. A new release or deployment used to be a whole event, where sometimes the team had to stay overnight at the office.

At Tophatter, all it took for you to get your code live was to just raise a PR and get it approved by any other engineer. The reviewer didn’t need to be a senior developer, a PM, or your team lead. And there was no DevOps either. It was all automated, as soon as you merge your code, the CI-CD pipeline would deploy it. In case it breaks anything, there were checks in place to alert the team ASAP, and even automatically revert the release if things got too bad. We used to easily do multiple deployments on the same day.

I can see how I am slowly able to realize my vision at my company as well. The very first set of interns I hired, took 4 months before they could make contributions to a significant client project. The next set took about a month, and the one after that took 2 weeks. But the most recent interns that I have hired, had been able to start making meaningful contributions from day 1.

There is still a long long way to go though, with lots of processes to be added and refined. But I am happy with the progress that we have been able to make so far.