Devibe Podcast

We met with Lukas Sliwka, CTO at Grindr, in their West Hollywood office to learn more about what it takes both from the team and from his leadership to scale up a backed stack to meet 3.2 Million DAUs (Daily Active Users). We covered so many things, including: How the to scale the Grindr stack from 800,000 and to millions of DAUs and how a near crisis was handled over a holiday in a remote starbucks parking lot. We also learned how the combination of the performance and low maintenance needed to keep infrastructure in place made led Grindr’s engineering team to consolidate their databases to Amazon Aurora. On failure, we learned about Lukas’s thesis on failing fast, but almost as important, trusting the executive team to carry their message forward and ensure that the entire engineering team can fail fast and improve. We also learned lessons from a “big bang rewrite” decision, including its impact on new functionality and market competitiveness. We looked carefully at the evolution of Lukas’s leadership an

We met with Karim Varela, CTO at Coffee Meets Bagel, in their San Francisco office, right off of Market St., and had the opportunity to learn more about the leadership, team, and beliefs that enable Karim’s team to build a consistently high quality product. We covered many things including : Android vs IOS app. If you’re trying to build a global scale app, you should start on Android (80% of the market share globally). If your goal is start making money from rich Americans, than start on iOS. On pursuing a career in tech, and how San Francisco is great, but not the only place. Starting off in Portland, Karim worked out of hacker houses in Bali, Costa Rica, as well as working full time in Los Angeles for Tinder before making the move to San Francisco. At Coffee Meets Bagel, Karim manages an active team of engineers both in their offices in San Francisco, as well as remote teams. How the re-airing of a pitch to Mark Cuban on Shark Tank impacts traffic by 2 to 3 times the normal load. How building a side pro

In 2010, Seth Haley, a creative director in New York finally gained traction with his synth wave project Com Truise. Called one of the best musical artist to code to, the Com Truise project has become popular with both engineers and the general public for its 80s style, synthetic, and rich beats. We met Com Truise in San Francisco and discovered a strong connection in the habits, routines, and interests that help both create great music and durable code, including Focusing on the most important thing to get one in the day from 5:00AM to 1:00PM without interruption from email, social media, or the internet. How simple the music actually is despite sounding complex Completing the body of a new tracks in one sitting by surrounding himself with silence. We covered many topics, including: Early beginnings working as an art director in NYC Sneaking as a drum and bass DJ back in the day 1:45 Where “Com Truise” came from Downtempo vs synth wave music 5:00 Inspiration behind the music from Neon Indian, Prince, Mic