Developer to Manager

I pushed out the first blog post today. I had been considering starting a blog on the site for a few months now, and in the past few weeks really started outlining a few topics which would be well suited for a blog post.

At the end I decided to keep things simple and just focus on topics related to (and at times tangential to) engineering management. The first post is basically an introduction. The posts that come after this one would get deeper into the topics. Looking forward!

I posted the link to Hacker News, and it was super exciting!

The site received about 50,000 page views, roughly half of them unique. The mailing list also exploded from ~75 subscribers to ~2000. It was fascinating to see this amount of growth, basically overnight.

More importantly though, it showed that the product really has potential, and resonates with a lot of other software developers.

The site now has a cool new design that makes everything look nice, but also much more functional. It required a couple of backend changes (mostly how the site is compiled to static files), but nothing major.

Overall, I'm super happy with how the site finally looks like!

I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for Developer to Manager.

I worked mostly nights and weekends, and built the whole thing as a static website using Python/Flask since Python is what I'm most comfortable with, and Flask offers a library called Frozen-Flask that lets you "freeze" your app into a static site so that you can simply upload the resulting HTML/CSS/JS code.

I'm trying to keep the software development effort to a minimum so I can focus on other important things.

One of the most common advice in the startup community is to solve your own problem. That's how I ended up with the idea for Developer to Manager.

Having co-founded a startup with a small engineering team, I realized that my job description was not just "writing code", but also coordinating & managing people/projects. I wanted to know how others in a similar situation approached the subject but couldn't find any such resource. So I decided to build one!