CTO Diaries #4: On not shipping your org chart
2023-08-09
You’ve probably heard of the warning “Don’t ship the org chart” common among product development circles. I always thought of this as synonymous to Conway’s Law which states that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. In my experience, I’ve come to believe that this is true. Whether you like it or not, it is an eventuality. At some point I thought that to be an effective solutions architect, you have to be an “org architect”.
Conways-Law · Cto · Cto-Diaries · Diaries · Tech
3 minutes
CTO Diaries #3: On choosing technology stacks
2023-04-01
When it comes to tech stack selection, in general, I always approach it in terms of tradeoffs. And when it comes to understanding tradeoffs; what you gain vs what you lose, I think experience plays a big part. In my 18+ years of experience building systems, I’ve been bitten enough times that I view most of them with a fair bit of cynicism. I wouldn’t really say that experience definitely makes me better at it; I still have my own biases and experience doesn’t really ‘fix’ the illogical side of me being a human being with emotions.
Cto · Cto-Diaries · Diaries · Startup · Tech
5 minutes
2022-09-27
Hi. It’s been a year since my last「CTO diaries」post. Never mind the excuses, there’s a lot. Anyway, so what does my typical, or normal day, look like? Well, I usually start the day with checking the overall health of our systems. We don’t really have very sophisticated monitoring and alerting systems at this point so this means checking on several areas such as our Kubernetes clusters, databases, and critical services. On top of my head, I think the most common service crashes I noticed so far are OOM-related.
Cto · Cto-Diaries · Diaries · Startup
3 minutes
2021-09-28
So far, I’ve been posting some techy stuff here and there but being a CTO of a relatively small, Japan-based startup for about three years now, I thought I’d share some of my experiences along the way. But first off, a little bit of context: the company I work for, Alphaus Cloud is fairly small; about 10 engineers scattered across three countries, although at one point, we hit at around 35.
Cto · Cto-Diaries · Diaries · Startup
3 minutes