About

About this site

Staff Engineers scale their impact beyond the individual contributor path. In many cases, you see this manifested as a heavy focus on platform components and developer interfaces.

This leaves product-focued engineers in a weird, ill-defined space where it may be difficult to find a path towards growth into the Staff Engineer role. As a product engineer you may find much of your time spent on feature work that is intrinsically narrow in scope. Contrasted with your partners on Site Reliability and Developer Platform teams (for example) whose work is often inherently broad in impact, you may find it disheartening to try an find a foothold on the path to Staff Engineer.

This site exists to help you. The thoughts and stories shared here are from the perspective of a product-focued software engineer, but the content is not solely intended for those with a product-focus. Ideally, the perspective shared here will be useful to all - from prospective Staff Engineers to established Staff Engineers who may not have as much daily exposure to the product and feature side of technical leadership.

About me

Hey, I’m Dylan.

I live in Seattle with my wife, kid, Carl (our Great Dane) and Kip (our cat) where I work as a Software Engineer.

I enjoy painting, astrophotography, and nature.

I’ve been in the industry for over a decade now, many of those years in a tech lead role.

I’m actually not a Staff Engineer currently, but I am on the path. This site is a way for me to “rubber duck” my own process and experiences as I continue to learn and grow, and as a vector for sharing my experiences with other current and prospective Staff Engineers.