The rate at which Damus is improving with one leader and open source contributors is astounding. It really makes me question whether most teams within tech companies (ours included) aren't overly bloated with talent and functionally slowing themselves down?
Discussion
Of course they are. More head count means more process. Releases take far longer. Ideas scrutinized. When you’re small you’re lean. You can make decisions off of gut feel, not what 20 product owners have justified through hours of user research.
💯 speaking the truth, HOGL
What’s it like at Cash App? Do you have freedom to ship or hamstrung?
Within our teams we have great autonomy to choose what we work on and how we lead our organization. Our team sits amongst others that make up the other big features of Cash. As we've grown (with caution and pacing) I've noticed that our own rate (as a company) of shipping has slowed and there are moments when decision making has suffered or appeared stuck.
#[2] you’re getting kudos for your leadership
God I love it. The purity and efficiency you get with a tiny team of rockstar developers is astounding. As a small business owner and sole developer in a company of ~3 I get half-mast for highly efficient operations.
Love the enthusiasm 🍆
but who will write and beautifully illustrate my first bitcoin 😏
should have an ester egg if damus is installed and it just say “we get it, it’s for zaps”
THIS 🤙🔥⚡️
Maybe… it’s a lot of work and will need to scale. It’s awesome to watch and learn.
Agreed- lots to learn from what's happening here on Damus and across nostr in general - absolutely loving every moment
A great example of a concept called “flash teams” I think.
https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2014/flashteams/flashteams-uist2014.pdf
Thanks, Peter! Added to my reading list to check out this week 🙏
Lots of subtle taxes going from startup teams to companies with 500+ engineers (and public shareholders) like CashApp. Even more when going from 10s of thousands of active users to tens of millions. The amount of parallel development, business unit interop, and "stakeholder alignment" takes the wind out of plenty of features that should be straightforward to ship. The flip side is that everything that does ship gets immediate access to 10s of millions of people leading to a ton of leverage. I'm still very optimistic about the velocity of Nostr clients in the short term, but I suspect we will start to uncover more pain as the number of NIPs increase and the feature set between servers and clients becomes wider. Luckily, the FOSS community has a lot of preexisting knowledge on how to do this at scale so the tools exist and we get to see how they work. Not many other industries where the process is so transparent so don't forget to bring popcorn.