Great Engineering War Stories

Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites.

These four stories are ordered by scale.  We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.

In order of appearance:

• Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
• Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime. A story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
• Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello. The story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
• Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by Twitter. A story about screening your customers for success