Katie Wilde
VP of Engineering @ Buffer
A collection of 13 posts
In the spring of 2021, we put out an engagement survey to our engineering team to understand their experience at Buffer. In this post, we share the very honest and eye-opening survey results, and the action steps we plan to take from our learnings.
Having managers isn’t something we do at Buffer just because it’s what other companies usually do. We’ve always been proud to be different and to follow the path less travelled — even when it comes to people management. Over the past few years, we’ve tried it all: from experimenting with full self-management (no managers) to having leads and managers supporting our team [https://bu
As a globally distributed team , one of the most interesting things to experiment with is how we collaborate and innovate when we’re all spread out. A couple weeks ago, we tried out that stalwart of engineering innovation – the hackathon! In researching hackathons, it was clear we needed to rethink a lot of the traditional structure … particularly this: As a remote team, we couldn’t all be in a room together, ordering in food and grouping around a laptop.
Until pretty recently, we didn’t have a “product process” at Buffer when it came to how we built the product. Initially, we were proud of our super lean approach with an engineer or two collaborating with a product manager and figuring it out as they went along. This worked well when we were smaller, but as our team grew and we wanted to build more ambitious products , timelines started to get unrealistically long and we were shipping cars all in
Before you say context-switching is the worst, hear me out — being a manager , I’ll often have several calls back to back and need to shift emotional context quickly. I sometimes carry the mindset and energy of one meeting through to the next and it leaves me less emotionally attuned. I was getting tired from the effort of context-switching and sometimes would be visibly drained or stressed. This is a catching disease: second-hand stress [
Buffer Engineering Report December 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 215 m -13.7% Avg. response for buffer.com 262 ms +3.1% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 331 m +12.9% Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 264 ms -1.85% Code reviews given 83% of pull requests +32% Quality * 3 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 18 opened, 15 closed. (83% smashed, 6% up from December) * 9 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 33 opened, 24 closed (73%
During early startup days, everyone pitches into everything and just does what needs doing. The focus is on building a product: getting it out the door and delivering something great for our users. A small, flat team, a cluster of passionate engineers doing whatever it takes each day, works just fine. More than fine – it’s brilliant. It’s what got Buffer to where we are today, passing $12M in ARR with a team of 81 Bufferoos spread across the world, serving over 4 million users who send more tha
Buffer Engineering Report December 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 189 m -7.8% Avg. response for buffer.com 254 ms -4.2% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 288 m -33.9%* Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 269 ms -33.9% Code reviews given 51% of pull requests -12% Buffer Kubernetes Cluster * 9 nodes in cluster * 149 pods * 652million requests handled * Serving 58% of total traffic Bugs and Quality *
Buffer Engineering Report November 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 203 m -1.9% Avg. response for buffer.com 265 ms -5.4% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 430 m -59.8%* Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 196 ms +100% Code reviews given 63% of pull requests -3% *We offloaded nearly 60% of requests to api.bufferapp.com onto the Kubernetes cluster with the new links service! The links
Buffer Engineering Report October 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Requests for buffer.com 206 m +4% Avg. response for buffer.com 280 ms +4.8% Requests for api.bufferapp.com 1.06 b +1.9% Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 98 ms +12.7% Code reviews given 66% of pull requests -2% Bugs & Quality * 13 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 2 opened, 11 closed (84% smashed) * 16 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 5 opened, 11 closed (
Buffer Engineering Report September 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Key stats Requests for buffer.com 196 m Avg. response for buffer.com 226ms Requests for api.bufferapp.com 1.04 b Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 86.8 ms Bugs & Quality * Code reviews given: 68% of Pull Requests were reviewed * 4 S1 (severity 1) bugs: 4 opened, 3 closed. (42% smashed) * 24 S2 (severity 2) bugs: 9 opened, 13 closed (59
It feels ridiculous for me to write about being an engineering manager. It’s a job I’ve done for not even 30 days yet. But that’s what I want to know from others — how did you start? How did you make it through your first month? No two first rodeos are ever alike. But they’re all rodeos, and falling off is falling off. There’s some kind of pattern. So here I am, writing the post that I want to read. What is this job, anyway? I had a rough idea what I was getting into from the internal
For a long time, almost as long as I’ve been a member of the exclusive “Women in Tech” club, I’ve avoided talking about diversity. I modeled myself after Marissa Mayer, who when asked what it was like being the only female engineer at Google (back in the day) said, “I didn’t notice.” I completely believe this. It’s often very useful not to notice. Perhaps her blindness came naturally. For me, I trained myself not to notice being the only woman in the Slack channel because noticing hurt me. It