What I've been up to, February 2012

The last time I wrote I was about to leave Google and start my new job. Well I've been at Twilio for five months now and it's going great. I'm working on a new Developer Experience team, responsible for making sure Twilio's customers have a great experience after they sign up.

Building a better experience involves fixing a million little things on the site and in the API to delight our users and give them no chance to mess up. Doing this well means watching users whenever we can to figure out how they're using our product and following up to make the experience even better than it already is. One of our goals is to make people's phones ring within 5 minutes of signing up. We're not there yet but we hopefully will be soon.

This is my first time working with other people who also enjoy programming; they're much better than me and I've learned a lot from working with my team. In high school and college teachers always tell you they're going to grade this paper tough, because "in the real world you can't get away with stuff like this." Then you'd turn in the paper, and even though it had typos you'd still get an A or a B and the same cycle would repeat next paper. Well if your code has typos you can end up blowing up the entire website and costing the company a lot of money. Being more consistent is the biggest thing I've been working on.

I've been focusing on spending more time doing things I like to do and outsourcing or eliminating the rest. I wrote about some tricks you can use to help you hack your life, and also about why you should quit Facebook. I moved into the city (finally!) and love the short commute and excellent cheap food and drinks near our apartment.

If you're in SF, I'd love to meet up for lunch or drinks; if you're not, feel free to send me a quick update on what you've been up to. Hope to hear from you soon,

Kevin