> if you know how to leverage technology, you can build impressive things very quickly I worked at a start-up for 18 months at the start of 2020. I look at it

> if you know how to leverage technology, you can build impressive things very quickly I worked at a start-up for 18 months at the start of 2020. I look at it as the best experience of "flow" I'm ever likely to have. I come from an infrastructure/devops background, the two other engineers were developers (one with significant management experience) and the rest were data scientists. Within a crazy short time we had CI/CD, separate environments for dev, testing and production, extremely scalable infrastructure in multiple regions. We set up kanban, daily standups, weekly design meetings. We considered logging and metrics from the start. Product development was insanely quick, and there were essentially no infrastructure blockers because I was able to produce IaC and deploy it as it was required. We put heavy focus on minimizing cost to increase runway (ie: scale to zero, free services like gitlab & Cloudflare). In under a year we had an MVP that we could deploy to any region from scratch with two commands (terraform apply and a script to helm install the rest). I'll add one thing: while you can spin up impressive things quickly, it's easy to screw up. Like deciding you can ignore environments, regions and scalability "for now". You think you can do it later? You can't. Not when you've got a shitload of customers running in your one big janky data center. I know. Right now I'm working for a company who did this. There are no naming conventions. Deploying a new data center is a nightmare. I want to throw out all of their shitty code and start over, but I can't. The company is doing well but the VCs want to see rapid expansion into different regions and they're simply unable to do it. Build good foundations.