When code is cheap, judgement becomes the job

That was my wake up call: This company is different. Shipping fast is not just something we say, we ship fast. Every day, multiple times per day, even Fridays at 5pm. You might think that's cute but for a 21-person engineering org we ship with a velocity I wouldn't think possible 2 years ago when my young whippersnapper boss told me off for writing code the old fashioned way. We now auto-approve and merge 16% of all pull requests, perform big-bang migrations, ship a few hundred PRs every week, handle 1000 line pull requests like it's normal, and AI writes 97% of my code. Mostly without blowing things up in an operations heavy business where an outage can measure in thousands of dollars. Continue reading →