Prologue - The Five “W”s

Let’s quickly get some quick front matter out of the way, starting with the three less-important questions (who, when, where), before we tackle the juicy bits (what, & why).

If you don’t care about who wrote this, already trust, and/or just want to get to the good stuff, see 1 - “A Seat At The Table”.

Who Wrote This?

Hi. I’m Daniel Lindsley.

  • I tend to go by either @toastdriven or @daniellindsley most everywhere.

  • Professional software developer since 2005.

  • I’ve held titles like “Founder”, “Principal Engineer”, “Staff Software Engineer”, “Senior Software Engineer”, etc. (but don’t put too much faith in titles…)

  • Long-time OSS contributor to a bunch of projects.

  • Speaker at PyCon, DjangoCon, and elsewhere in the past.

When Was This Written?

End of 2024.

Where Can This Be Found?

A web-friendly version is hosted at https://greatengenv.rtfd.io/.

The original source can be found at https://github.com/toastdriven/greatengenv.

Why Did You Write This?

When most businesses are started, there’s rarely anything to follow. Beyond a few legal requirements and/or bits of documentation, there’s precious little required. Much of the business’ organization, & day-to-day, springs out of past experiences or habits.

Especially in the case of start-ups, faced with a short runway and a do-or-die scenario, all the focus tends to be spent on getting the product/service out the door, & into customer’s hands.

This leads to organic growth, and sometimes good things can bloom from the result…

…But…

Frequently, that result is:

  • Highly-specific to the organization

  • Created from pain points experienced along the way

  • Unevenly distributed amongst teams, team members, etc.

  • Ungainly structures that Work Now™ fall apart as scale increases

  • …And you have to start all over again at the next job

So, with that in mind…

What Is This?

This is my open guide on how to build the best damn Engineering department that you can.

We’ll cover:

  • How to standardize, …

  • What to consider, …

  • How to build for growth, …

  • & how to create a non-hostile, fair, fun, productive workplace that you and others can love working at.

What Isn’t This?

A Perfect Solution

There’s no formula for the perfect workplace. I’m doing my best to adapt the cream of my many experiences, but not everything will work for everyone.

A Complete Solution

You’ll have to work out some things for yourself. There may be blind spots, or things highly-custom to your environment you’ll have to separately solve.

An Enterprise Grade™ Solution

I don’t know the upper limits on the scalability of this (largest I’ve personally seen most of this work in was a ~250 person department). I don’t have answers for if you have next-to-no control, or a heavily pre-defined department/organization. And I also don’t know how well it’ll work in otherwise highly-political, BS-heavy environments. YMMV.

Generated In Any Part By AI

No part of any of this document was generated by an artifical intelligence. The most advanced tool used was plain old spell-check, and has a ZERO tolerance policy for any AI contributions (LLM or otherwise) going forward.

Still With Me?

If you’re still here, thanks! I hope some/any/all of this is helpful to you & your company. If so, I’d love to hear about it, so please drop me a line (or better yet, hire me)!