I joined Beamery as employee six and stayed through growth, unicorn status and repeated layoffs. I built an AI team, learned how long the wait for a financial return could be, and still wanted to build again.
Read Full ArticleI became a startup CTO expecting to build a product and lead a team. I also found myself running payroll, submitting VAT returns and maintaining a dashboard nobody else opened. A year in, I want to write down what I am still figuring out.
What self-service BI, Notion, and recent research on generative interfaces reveal about helping people shape both their tools and their path through a task.
What I look for when starting again, and what we did about each point at Mav9
What model reviews can tell us, who gets to decide and what an approval needs to prove
From founding engineer to CTO, through growth, layoffs and the reality of startup equity
What changed as we went from getting a company started to building with a team
Rethinking review, release approval and the promises in our policies
Building faster with a small team, and getting help with the work around the code
From a prototype and monthly goals to real data, fortnightly cycles, and a launch plan we had to rethink
What a dashboard couldn't give us, and the work we still owed the team
What the team needed from me before they could act with confidence
The decisions I had left open started to feel like proof that I could not do the job
Why I am writing about becoming a CTO while I am still becoming one
Why generative UI comes next, and what it has to preserve as the question changes
A four-step pattern for scientific thinking at work
What the charts show, what they leave out, and what to check next
Understanding the foundational frameworks of Agile software development
Making room for development while being honest about evaluation
How agile project management evolved from buzzwords to meaningful practices
A modern web development workflow for blogging
Create blog posts with Advanced MDX Dynamic Content, React components and APIs
Create unique images for each blog post dynamically with Next.js
Cookie-persisted theming that keeps server components on the server
Manage large audio or video files with pydub and OpenAI
What Contentlayer dying under my blog taught me about content infrastructure
How to structure your Next.js project for optimal performance and maintainability
How to create a dynamic pagination system for my Next.js blog
A comprehensive guide to Knowledge Graphs and their applications
Setting up a modular Jekyll blog with pagination, archives, search and a Grunt build
Enriching Dataset Profiles with Quality Indicators
Making DigitalOcean, Jekyll, GitHub and Travis CI all work
Setting up a superhero development environment
Facts, dimensions, and the cube as a mental model for analytical data
A comprehensive guide to the Resource Description Framework