Swizec Teller

hockeystick moments are the biggest opportunity of your career. It's exciting and kinda scary. Everything changes! I wrote Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick as your guide. 16 years of startup experience condensed into 240 pages scalingfastbook.com Scaling Fast is based on startup war stories, academic research papers, talking to my mentors, and reading industry insights. It shows you what it takes to survive and thrive through the hockeystick. You'll learn about scaling teams and scaling code, how they influence each other, and why none of it matters if the business is bad. Scaling Fast: Software Engineering Through the Hockeystick is organized in 3 sections: - Scaling the Business - Scaling the Team - Scaling the Tech The business part, that's to help you evaluate the companies you join, this isn't a business book. The team part, that's key to shaping your everyday. We talk about delegating decisions, empowering engineers, working smooth instead of fast, finishing things all the way to done, good code review culture, and shipping incrementally without risky big bang releases. The tech part, that's my favorite. We talk about good abstractions, architectural complexity, observing your systems break, making steady improvements to your code without huge refactoring sprints, why tests don't solve everything, what's even worth testing, how your team structure impacts what you can do with the code, and why solving today's problem is more important than building for an imagined future. None of it is about numerical scaling [name|]. That's easy in 2025. Computers are fast. The challenge is building complex systems that don't fit in any one person's brain without breaking the business. oftware engineering when your whole company changes every 6 months is the fun part of this gig. And that's what Scaling Fast is about. 👉 scalingfastbook.com

this view never gets old

Doing a lot is not the same as getting a lot done. Often the opposite

Better than a birthday cake

Birthday run with sister! She a spartan weirdo says not enough obstacles

Agent this agents that and it's all just Domain Driven Development same as it always has been. Guess what, agents write better code faster using less tokens when your words map directly to objects. AND you continue to understand the system even if you don't read every line

Building a habit of saying "This is a distraction" after sharing dumb exciting ideas with the team. Wish me luck

Perfect running weather today, a little moist not too hot. Good pace

Building outcome-focused engineering teams sounds easy in a book but in practice you’re saying “Ok so what does all that mean for the user?” over and over until you retire if you’re lucky others start saying it for you

Perhaps the most exciting part of all this agentic stuff: No more tech debt! You can actually finish migrations now 😍 swizec.com/blog/no-more-tech…

I can’t believe Tesla understands how to make an exciting sportscar better than Ferrari

You could clean house right now by reposting software engineering lessons from the 80's but add "agentic" to the title 🤔

So weird thing about being manager – if you're bad at focus your team is bad at focus How do I get better at focus when claude and friends make it so easy to start a bunch of things in parallel?

Amazing stuff. We've been using Start in production for 2 years. Love

Sometimes management is just giving people the exact next step so they stop overthinking doesn't matter if the step is wrong, they'll figure it out, you're giving them the freedom to get to work by implicitly taking any heat for outcomes