Glad to know, you don't have any of these SCRUM or Agile bullshit
5
We are very agile, in the work small ship often sense of the term. I’m a big fan of kanban too, just not dogmatic.
6
Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, gave us video hosting for free. For free! How cool is that? I just sent him an email and asked, and he hooked us up.
Good on you. The fact that you took the initiative and asked shouldn't be overlooked. Even within a community of makers/entrepreneurs, like Indie Hackers, I think this type of behavior is less common than one may think.
Yet the successful founders, like yourself, all seem to take the initiative, and do what others won't.
Thanks for the reminder 👍
6
Folks asking how Joel hired mentors… he took my class, 30x500, and while he didn't apply it right away (lots of people don't), he came back and started executing and showing up in the mailing list and making his progress visible to us, and when we gave him advice, he applied it. That meant I was always happy to give him more advice.
For a mentor, there's nothing more rewarding than someone who uses your advice. That's the whole point!
When people have approached me to ask for my mentorship, they typically do not respect that I am both busy and running my own biz, and they refuse to take advice and run with it. They don't come to tell me about the success they've had following my epic loads of free advice that I put out, and ask one very specific question that's easy for me to answer; they start from nothing, come with vague wants and dreams, and demand everything to be tailored personally to them. Usually "Will you be my mentor?" is followed up with all kinds of questions and pushback and whining that makes it very clear that what they want is a mommy. Very frustrating. Don't do this.
4
Go, Joel!! 😁
4
@joelhooks Great read and a very common sense, calm approach to building a modern business!
I want to expand that scope to something more like "bootstrapping a business on the Internet" and teach the fascinating range of topics in that basket.
+1
3
Excellent article Joel, thanks! How long did it take you to get the necessary skills to code the MVP? Did you use a boilerplate starter repo or did you create the app from scratch?
3
I was about 4 years into my career as a professional programmer/consultant. Before that I spent about 2 years learning and doing small freelance coding gigs.
It’s Rails, so by nature it gives you some boilerplate to work with. It’s also got a deep selection of libraries to do almost everything you need to glue together.
3
Egghead and Pluralsight are one of the best resources I came acrros over the years!
2
Thank you very much Joel and Courtland for this interview. It came at a time where I felt lost and stuck. I've been thinking about starting something of my own for quite a while now. That was also one of the reason why I became a developer, because my assumption was that it will be much easier to be able to code your own stuff.
As you have mentioned a lot of people start with the "solution first" approach. I've been part of that group from the very first moment where I started to realize that I want to start my own internet business. And since then it was kinda of like a "while (true)" without any base case where I could break out of the loop.
However, this interview here represents my personal epiphany. Especially the course and book recommendations you gave seem to be golden. I subscribed to the waiting list of Amy Hoy's 30x500 yesterday because it seems to be my break statement to jump out of the loop. Therefore, I'm really thankful.
I also have a question regarding this part:
" My first job lasted almost a full year, and I was spending my free time working on open source projects, mostly writing unit tests and documentation. This lead to my first conference talks, two book deals, and a lucrative gig as a consultant where I was a "senior technical architect."
After one year as a programmer you started to hold conference talks, made two book deals and had a lucrative gig as a consultant where you had a senior role? This seems pretty crazy. Or was this more a serious of events during your years as a programmer?
In any case, thanks again to you Joel and Courland for this great interview.
2
After one year as a programmer you started to hold conference talks, made two book deals and had a lucrative gig as a consultant where you had a senior role? This seems pretty crazy. Or was this more a serious of events during your years as a programmer?
I gave my first talk about a year into my career coding professionally full-time. It was over the course of the next year that I got the book deals and started working as a consultant for an agency.
It was intentional. I had a plan. It wasn't possible for me to start from scratch because I was 35 have a shitload of kids, so I consistently blogged, participated, and contributed wherever I could be helpful. My favorite book that captures the idea is @NathanBarry's Authority. It really works.
My friend and mentor Jesse Warden told me "Joel. You don't go to conferences, you speak at conferences." which was a huge "aha!" for me. It was very, very hard for me. I'm a high anxiety cave nerd, and the first talks felt like I was hyperventilating the entire time. Still does a bit, but it gets better with practice.
1
Thanks for taking the time answering my question. I'm 32 right now (still cannot believe it), have been a professional coder for 3 years and what I was lacking until now was a solid plan. Thanks to your story I realized this problem (it seems obvious but I always thought that I will come up with an idea at one point and go from there), changed already a few things and I'm currently working on my own plan to finally get my ass up and change direction.
Also thanks for @NathanBarry's book recommendation. I read his interview here on IH a couple of months ago and was really impressed by his work on ConvertKit.
Again thank you very much for sharing your story and keep up the great work at egghead.
2
Calm. Incremental. Consistent. is a great message. Big fan of EggHeads and your work, Joel! Also the free screencast making series is so helpful plus the content for instructors has changed the way I did online teaching.
Big thank you for your transparency as well. 💯
2
Egghead has been a great resource for quick learning of many modern javascript stuff for me, I can't recommend it enough, it has given me crucial knowledge which helped me get my latest job.
2
@joelhooks egghead was a great resource when I started my coding journey a few years ago. Solid content. Thanks for sharing.
2
Where do you hire mentors?
9
Folks like Amy Hoy and Brennan Dunn are examples. I've hired business coaches, agile coaches, code coaches, etc. They are out there. People that are in the advice business. Often instead of "I'd love to pick your brain" I ask "Hi, I was wondering if I could pay your consulting rate for some advice time"
I've done this at the personal level, but it's also great now that we have a budget to do this at the business level.
"Can we pay you a monthly retainer to hang out in our Slack and make observations?"
Not everybody has the time and inclination for this, and it requires that we are an excellent customer that respects time, scope, and the advice we are given.
1
Do you have a board of advisors?
2
No, we don't. I've got "just enough business skill" to get by. Always assumed people with a killer advisor board like to network/leave the house.
2
At $240K/mo revenue, is it a high margin? are you able to live a freedom lifestyle or does a lot of that $ goto expenses and bandwidth/hosting?
4
Bandwidth and hosting are nominal expenses compared to royalties and the salaries/benefits for people working with us. Definitely able to live comfortably after all the bills are paid.
3
BTW I came across egghead a while ago and decided to use it to relearn modern web development. I've been through the free HTML/CSS tutorials and they are great. I'm looking forward to starting JS.
2
Thanks for sharing! How did you differentiate yourself from all the other coding learning platforms out there?
3
As a user, I find they'll have the most relevant & up to date content around.
I decided to stick around when I saw that the Redux screencasts were actually done by Dan Abramov himself.
3
We've always focused on delivering well-curated, concise, top quality content that is highly relevant to our audience. I don’t know if that is a big differentiation, but it seems to resonate.
1
In my opinion the quality of education per minute of video at egghead is way higher than anything else I've seen.
1
Excellent post @joelhooks, I learned Angular JS from Johns videos on youtube in the early days. Reading the background of EggHead.io helps me a lot. To see that you had failed in the past and tried Amy's course.
The part that you said that start with the problem vs starting with a solution also resonated.
I really thank you for sharing this here.
1
To me this is such a grate post, inspiring in every way, and beyond everything concrete and useful, even more so this resonate as I'm egghead user.
1
Fantastic article Joel, very inspiring
1
Hi Joel. Congratulations for what you have achieved. It's amazing. I am curious to know, what marketing strategies you apply to bring subscribers?
2
Thanks! Organic search and email, primarily. We've done a bit of advertising on Facebook, but I don't want to participate in their global thought experiment so we stopped.
1
I love egghead, but as a business it just confuses me that you succeeded so well. The reason is this: If I had been considering building something like egghead, I would have thought, "What with youtube and udemy already existing, there's really no market for this." How do you think you managed to attract a huge audience away from those sites and their educational offerings?
3
Relatively speaking our audience is microscopic compared to YouTube. It’s definitely not huge. Consistency and curation is what we try to achieve. Which is definitely not the case at either of those two sites.
1
There is a cult of "productivity" that I just don't follow. In the early days, I was burning the midnight oil to get everything rolling. But it's entirely vital that I not burn out, so over time I've reduced my hours. I take days off frequently. I will sometimes spend full days just relaxing around the house. I take vacations. I chill.
You don't need to kill yourself to succeed.
1
Wow, I used your site earlier today! Funny coincidence that this post shows up.
Your product is great, and congrats on all the success you've had!
1
Good to read your story, 3 years ago, when I quit my high paid consulting job to start my indie adventure, I used egghead.io to learn angular and d3.js, I subscribed for a month to binge the videos and started coding.
I highly recommend it for anyone that wants to get up to speed with a specific skill, brush up their knowledge on the stack, or keep refreshed. Having access to video works better then stack overflow for me in these cases.
1
"The most significant mistake I see people make is that they start with the solution. They think they see a problem, and they jump straight to the idea. Then they build the idea before they have any customers."
Wow - Yea, this is hard. I right now am in that predicament. I'm not really part of the community I have a solution for and feel the need to build something first to show them. My community is developers - which outside your great story is not an ideal community to sell to, so thus I look outside of that.
2
Developers buy all sorts of stuff. People are making a lot of money programming computers. This means two things, there is a base of people already making that code cash and there is a huge group of people that want to make that code cash.
The “developers don’t buy” idea is 100% completely false.
“Can I save them time? Can I make them money?”
1
Hey, @joelhooks I noticed you on levelsio's Twitter nine days ago!
It's only up to about 460 subs but the content does seem to be resonating and people have been actively adding it to lists on places like elixirforum.com. I'd love to make videos for Egghead.io as a vehicle to reach a wider audience and fund some of my personal coding projects, if that's possible.
Do you let people who are teaching on their own sites or channels teach on Egghead?
Thanks. I read that page 9 days ago before emailing the same question I asked above but didn't get a response.
1
@joelhooks I really enjoyed your story. What video software do most of the contributors use to make screencasts?
You mentioned that you help homeschool your kids. What methods have worked best for teaching new concepts in your opinion?
Best regards
Ty
2
We're pretty much unschooling at this point. Kids are open to new concepts, generally. None of them so far has been very gung-ho to program computers at an early age. I'm always a little suspect of folks that state they have been "coding since they were 8" heh
1
Depending on the age, the learning resources code and go robot mouse is one that my daughter really liked. Scratch Jr is another one that she has had fun with. But these are more game like and teach certain fundamentals rather than pure programming.
2
They’ve poked at these things but just prefer other activities instead, which is fine too. We let them drive the bus for the most part. 😄
1
I totally agree on letting them drive the bus. I take the approach of broad exposure to many different topics so they form in their mind confidence that they can do anything
1
cough I was programming my Apple //c before 8. 😂
1
I was doing TELL TURTLE on a TRS80 when I was 8 as well. They dropped it in favor of Oregon Trail and shit though. Shame. Didn’t pick it back up until high school.
My kids didn’t give a fuck though. lol
1
Naw man, I was doing BASIC! On my own! #nerdcredflashing
I bet your kids would be more into it if it were more puzzle-like, like the stuff they're doing at DynamicLand. I think most kids would be interested in that, vs the "OMG I CAN CHANGE WHAT'S ON THE SCREEN" which was magical back in 1990 and meh-whatever today.
1
I was programming BASIC back in 1985. Making maze games. That brought back some memories
Being a great programmer and being a great teacher are different things. Make sure to speak clearly and that your ideas build logically, from a strong foundation. Consider putting a post-it note with "Smile!" next to your microphone, then follow that reminder - listeners can tell when you don't.
1
Thanks for the article! I was wondering what steps you took to hire your first employees? Did you hire within your network or did you reach out beyond? And when did you decide it was the right time to do so?
2
Actually used odesk. Freelance to hire. I’m really slow with CSS and layout so when we wanted to “design beyond Bootstrap” I needed help.
1
Interesting story.
At times it has been a genuine sacrifice and required a "family meeting" to invest in mentorship, but it has been worth it.
What does "family meeting" mean in this context? discussing the expenses on mentors with his family?
2
you got it.
1
Thank you for your story, Joel!
I did not understand the last part: "Instead of looking for mentors, hire mentors". What exactly do you mean with this? What did you do before? And what did you do afterwards?
In the beginning you were looking for free mentors? And you asked people to be your mentor? In the end you just paid for mentors? If so, how and where did you find the mentors? And how did you decide if a mentor is worth it?
3
People are often sitting around, waiting for some individual to discover their potential/value and mentor them to success. People also ask the question "will you mentor me?" to folks that they hold in esteem.
Both of these approaches can work if you've got the presence and charisma, or you can find folks that you respect and offer to compensate them to hang out with you and offer wisdom/advice.
1
Wow perfect timing for 500 error :) I came by email newsletter so probably a number of people will do. It always happens when you don't want to be the most :). Nice interview BTW.
0
We are a continuous deployment shop. 10ish deploys a day, so it happens.
3
Actually it shouldn't happen probably you have a bad deployment logic but it is your website/business of course :)
0
Thanks for the tip?
4
Can't say if it is sarcasm or not, but a standard practice is to deploy to a staging slot, warm it up, run smoke tests over it and then promote it to production (and do not promote it if tests didn't pass obviously). This way no 500 ever are going to happen (due to CI, that is).
We don't have deadlines.
We don't work overtime.
We require people take time off.
We don't have a massive backlog.
We don't estimate.
We don't have stand-up meetings.
We don't SCRUM™.
We don't relentlessly sprint to be Agile™.
Glad to know, you don't have any of these SCRUM or Agile bullshit
We are very agile, in the work small ship often sense of the term. I’m a big fan of kanban too, just not dogmatic.
Good on you. The fact that you took the initiative and asked shouldn't be overlooked. Even within a community of makers/entrepreneurs, like Indie Hackers, I think this type of behavior is less common than one may think.
Yet the successful founders, like yourself, all seem to take the initiative, and do what others won't.
Thanks for the reminder 👍
Folks asking how Joel hired mentors… he took my class, 30x500, and while he didn't apply it right away (lots of people don't), he came back and started executing and showing up in the mailing list and making his progress visible to us, and when we gave him advice, he applied it. That meant I was always happy to give him more advice.
For a mentor, there's nothing more rewarding than someone who uses your advice. That's the whole point!
When people have approached me to ask for my mentorship, they typically do not respect that I am both busy and running my own biz, and they refuse to take advice and run with it. They don't come to tell me about the success they've had following my epic loads of free advice that I put out, and ask one very specific question that's easy for me to answer; they start from nothing, come with vague wants and dreams, and demand everything to be tailored personally to them. Usually "Will you be my mentor?" is followed up with all kinds of questions and pushback and whining that makes it very clear that what they want is a mommy. Very frustrating. Don't do this.
Go, Joel!! 😁
@joelhooks Great read and a very common sense, calm approach to building a modern business!
+1
Excellent article Joel, thanks! How long did it take you to get the necessary skills to code the MVP? Did you use a boilerplate starter repo or did you create the app from scratch?
I was about 4 years into my career as a professional programmer/consultant. Before that I spent about 2 years learning and doing small freelance coding gigs.
It’s Rails, so by nature it gives you some boilerplate to work with. It’s also got a deep selection of libraries to do almost everything you need to glue together.
Egghead and Pluralsight are one of the best resources I came acrros over the years!
Thank you very much Joel and Courtland for this interview. It came at a time where I felt lost and stuck. I've been thinking about starting something of my own for quite a while now. That was also one of the reason why I became a developer, because my assumption was that it will be much easier to be able to code your own stuff.
As you have mentioned a lot of people start with the "solution first" approach. I've been part of that group from the very first moment where I started to realize that I want to start my own internet business. And since then it was kinda of like a "while (true)" without any base case where I could break out of the loop.
However, this interview here represents my personal epiphany. Especially the course and book recommendations you gave seem to be golden. I subscribed to the waiting list of Amy Hoy's 30x500 yesterday because it seems to be my break statement to jump out of the loop. Therefore, I'm really thankful.
I also have a question regarding this part:
" My first job lasted almost a full year, and I was spending my free time working on open source projects, mostly writing unit tests and documentation. This lead to my first conference talks, two book deals, and a lucrative gig as a consultant where I was a "senior technical architect."
After one year as a programmer you started to hold conference talks, made two book deals and had a lucrative gig as a consultant where you had a senior role? This seems pretty crazy. Or was this more a serious of events during your years as a programmer?
In any case, thanks again to you Joel and Courland for this great interview.
I gave my first talk about a year into my career coding professionally full-time. It was over the course of the next year that I got the book deals and started working as a consultant for an agency.
It was intentional. I had a plan. It wasn't possible for me to start from scratch because I was 35 have a shitload of kids, so I consistently blogged, participated, and contributed wherever I could be helpful. My favorite book that captures the idea is @NathanBarry's Authority. It really works.
My friend and mentor Jesse Warden told me "Joel. You don't go to conferences, you speak at conferences." which was a huge "aha!" for me. It was very, very hard for me. I'm a high anxiety cave nerd, and the first talks felt like I was hyperventilating the entire time. Still does a bit, but it gets better with practice.
Thanks for taking the time answering my question. I'm 32 right now (still cannot believe it), have been a professional coder for 3 years and what I was lacking until now was a solid plan. Thanks to your story I realized this problem (it seems obvious but I always thought that I will come up with an idea at one point and go from there), changed already a few things and I'm currently working on my own plan to finally get my ass up and change direction.
Also thanks for @NathanBarry's book recommendation. I read his interview here on IH a couple of months ago and was really impressed by his work on ConvertKit.
Again thank you very much for sharing your story and keep up the great work at egghead.
Calm. Incremental. Consistent. is a great message. Big fan of EggHeads and your work, Joel! Also the free screencast making series is so helpful plus the content for instructors has changed the way I did online teaching.
Big thank you for your transparency as well. 💯
Egghead has been a great resource for quick learning of many modern javascript stuff for me, I can't recommend it enough, it has given me crucial knowledge which helped me get my latest job.
@joelhooks egghead was a great resource when I started my coding journey a few years ago. Solid content. Thanks for sharing.
Where do you hire mentors?
Folks like Amy Hoy and Brennan Dunn are examples. I've hired business coaches, agile coaches, code coaches, etc. They are out there. People that are in the advice business. Often instead of "I'd love to pick your brain" I ask "Hi, I was wondering if I could pay your consulting rate for some advice time"
I've done this at the personal level, but it's also great now that we have a budget to do this at the business level.
"Can we pay you a monthly retainer to hang out in our Slack and make observations?"
Not everybody has the time and inclination for this, and it requires that we are an excellent customer that respects time, scope, and the advice we are given.
Do you have a board of advisors?
No, we don't. I've got "just enough business skill" to get by. Always assumed people with a killer advisor board like to network/leave the house.
At $240K/mo revenue, is it a high margin? are you able to live a freedom lifestyle or does a lot of that $ goto expenses and bandwidth/hosting?
Bandwidth and hosting are nominal expenses compared to royalties and the salaries/benefits for people working with us. Definitely able to live comfortably after all the bills are paid.
BTW I came across egghead a while ago and decided to use it to relearn modern web development. I've been through the free HTML/CSS tutorials and they are great. I'm looking forward to starting JS.
Thanks for sharing! How did you differentiate yourself from all the other coding learning platforms out there?
As a user, I find they'll have the most relevant & up to date content around.
I decided to stick around when I saw that the Redux screencasts were actually done by Dan Abramov himself.
We've always focused on delivering well-curated, concise, top quality content that is highly relevant to our audience. I don’t know if that is a big differentiation, but it seems to resonate.
In my opinion the quality of education per minute of video at egghead is way higher than anything else I've seen.
Excellent post @joelhooks, I learned Angular JS from Johns videos on youtube in the early days. Reading the background of EggHead.io helps me a lot. To see that you had failed in the past and tried Amy's course.
The part that you said that start with the problem vs starting with a solution also resonated.
I really thank you for sharing this here.
To me this is such a grate post, inspiring in every way, and beyond everything concrete and useful, even more so this resonate as I'm egghead user.
Fantastic article Joel, very inspiring
Hi Joel. Congratulations for what you have achieved. It's amazing. I am curious to know, what marketing strategies you apply to bring subscribers?
Thanks! Organic search and email, primarily. We've done a bit of advertising on Facebook, but I don't want to participate in their global thought experiment so we stopped.
I love egghead, but as a business it just confuses me that you succeeded so well. The reason is this: If I had been considering building something like egghead, I would have thought, "What with youtube and udemy already existing, there's really no market for this." How do you think you managed to attract a huge audience away from those sites and their educational offerings?
Relatively speaking our audience is microscopic compared to YouTube. It’s definitely not huge. Consistency and curation is what we try to achieve. Which is definitely not the case at either of those two sites.
Wow, I used your site earlier today! Funny coincidence that this post shows up.
Your product is great, and congrats on all the success you've had!
Good to read your story, 3 years ago, when I quit my high paid consulting job to start my indie adventure, I used egghead.io to learn angular and d3.js, I subscribed for a month to binge the videos and started coding.
I highly recommend it for anyone that wants to get up to speed with a specific skill, brush up their knowledge on the stack, or keep refreshed. Having access to video works better then stack overflow for me in these cases.
"The most significant mistake I see people make is that they start with the solution. They think they see a problem, and they jump straight to the idea. Then they build the idea before they have any customers."
Wow - Yea, this is hard. I right now am in that predicament. I'm not really part of the community I have a solution for and feel the need to build something first to show them. My community is developers - which outside your great story is not an ideal community to sell to, so thus I look outside of that.
Developers buy all sorts of stuff. People are making a lot of money programming computers. This means two things, there is a base of people already making that code cash and there is a huge group of people that want to make that code cash.
The “developers don’t buy” idea is 100% completely false.
“Can I save them time? Can I make them money?”
Hey, @joelhooks I noticed you on levelsio's Twitter nine days ago!
For the past 3 months, I've been teaching the Elixir programming language on YouTube.
It's only up to about 460 subs but the content does seem to be resonating and people have been actively adding it to lists on places like elixirforum.com. I'd love to make videos for Egghead.io as a vehicle to reach a wider audience and fund some of my personal coding projects, if that's possible.
Do you let people who are teaching on their own sites or channels teach on Egghead?
you can read about our process here: https://instructor.egghead.io
Thanks. I read that page 9 days ago before emailing the same question I asked above but didn't get a response.
@joelhooks I really enjoyed your story. What video software do most of the contributors use to make screencasts?
You mentioned that you help homeschool your kids. What methods have worked best for teaching new concepts in your opinion?
Best regards
Ty
We're pretty much unschooling at this point. Kids are open to new concepts, generally. None of them so far has been very gung-ho to program computers at an early age. I'm always a little suspect of folks that state they have been "coding since they were 8" heh
Depending on the age, the learning resources code and go robot mouse is one that my daughter really liked. Scratch Jr is another one that she has had fun with. But these are more game like and teach certain fundamentals rather than pure programming.
They’ve poked at these things but just prefer other activities instead, which is fine too. We let them drive the bus for the most part. 😄
I totally agree on letting them drive the bus. I take the approach of broad exposure to many different topics so they form in their mind confidence that they can do anything
cough I was programming my Apple //c before 8. 😂
I was doing TELL TURTLE on a TRS80 when I was 8 as well. They dropped it in favor of Oregon Trail and shit though. Shame. Didn’t pick it back up until high school.
My kids didn’t give a fuck though. lol
Naw man, I was doing BASIC! On my own! #nerdcredflashing
I bet your kids would be more into it if it were more puzzle-like, like the stuff they're doing at DynamicLand. I think most kids would be interested in that, vs the "OMG I CAN CHANGE WHAT'S ON THE SCREEN" which was magical back in 1990 and meh-whatever today.
I was programming BASIC back in 1985. Making maze games. That brought back some memories
https://instructor.egghead.io has some technical details about screencast production
Being a great programmer and being a great teacher are different things. Make sure to speak clearly and that your ideas build logically, from a strong foundation. Consider putting a post-it note with "Smile!" next to your microphone, then follow that reminder - listeners can tell when you don't.
Thanks for the article! I was wondering what steps you took to hire your first employees? Did you hire within your network or did you reach out beyond? And when did you decide it was the right time to do so?
Actually used odesk. Freelance to hire. I’m really slow with CSS and layout so when we wanted to “design beyond Bootstrap” I needed help.
Interesting story.
What does "family meeting" mean in this context? discussing the expenses on mentors with his family?
you got it.
Thank you for your story, Joel!
I did not understand the last part: "Instead of looking for mentors, hire mentors". What exactly do you mean with this? What did you do before? And what did you do afterwards?
In the beginning you were looking for free mentors? And you asked people to be your mentor? In the end you just paid for mentors? If so, how and where did you find the mentors? And how did you decide if a mentor is worth it?
People are often sitting around, waiting for some individual to discover their potential/value and mentor them to success. People also ask the question "will you mentor me?" to folks that they hold in esteem.
Both of these approaches can work if you've got the presence and charisma, or you can find folks that you respect and offer to compensate them to hang out with you and offer wisdom/advice.
Wow perfect timing for 500 error :) I came by email newsletter so probably a number of people will do. It always happens when you don't want to be the most :). Nice interview BTW.
We are a continuous deployment shop. 10ish deploys a day, so it happens.
Actually it shouldn't happen probably you have a bad deployment logic but it is your website/business of course :)
Thanks for the tip?
Can't say if it is sarcasm or not, but a standard practice is to deploy to a staging slot, warm it up, run smoke tests over it and then promote it to production (and do not promote it if tests didn't pass obviously). This way no 500 ever are going to happen (due to CI, that is).
Again, sorry if it is an unsolicited answer :)