Its been a little over 2.5 years since I started working full-time as an engineer, mostly front-end with a mix of backend.

I spent the first year at TikTok where I was a pure front-end engineer, working on mostly internal stuff that didn't really challenge the product aspect of engineering. Most time were spent debating with senior engineers on how processes could be improved rather than shipping actual shit. It was around the 1 year mark that I came across Breeze, an fintech payments startup that was hiring randomly on Linkedin.

To me that was really exciting: the aspect of actually shipping stuff users will use, seeing first-hand and being directly responsible for the trajectory of the company.

And thus to the shock of some of my friends, I threw the letter at TikTok and betted on Breeze, as well as betting on myself to absorb as much as I can from a growing startup.

Its a freaking long 1.5 years so far: causing multiple production incidents, learning proper production back-end from scratch, re-writing the core front-end from scratch and even doing random stuff like setting up Grafana dashboard in the early days. But the journey has been absolutely rewarding so far: growing from 1 merchant to 20+ active merchants and literally seeing the revenue and headcount 10x has been absolutely surreal. I still remember the moment we hit 100m ARR with only 10-20 employees which is fucking insane in retrospect.

I also learnt so much shit from my fellow engineers/managers. Its amazing how so much talent can gather in a single room with the drive and focus to ship stuff.

Ownership culture

One culture that is very strong and prominent is the ownership culture. You build it, you maintain it and always strive to make it better. Be the one to answer any questions regarding it in Slack even though you are not tagged. Be the one to voice out any concerns because the growth of your product is directly impactful to you as an engineer.

Overcommunication culture

As the whole team is split over Singapore,US and Bulgaria, timezone differences make it sometimes hard to communicate. One thing that I took away from Breeze is the practice of overcommunication. Even if its annoying or you think might be irrelevant, just send it out in Slack, get the message across and let people know that the effort has been delivered.

Ship fast and unblock people

It doesn't have to be the customers you are integrating with, it can also be internal colleagues you are working with, always seek to unblock people and never be the bottleneck. This ties back to the ownership culture, if things can be done in 5-minute, just do it and if you can't communicate the blockers and what would be the estimate period till you can unblock them.

I won't be covering technical takeaways in this post as there too many scattered and valuable lessons I have learnt, but the above principles have been incredibly helpful in shaping the engineer I am today. There's still so many to improve upon though.

That's all for now lads