Thread by @shayfrendt

Today marks 6 years at @github for me.

I set out to learn some things about building a startup. I. have. learned. some. things.

Here are a few...

That nobody knows what your startup does just yet is an opportunity for a fun two-way conversation.

Not being awkward on video chat takes a lot of practice. But then you're still probably awkward.

Scaling is hard. Everything will break. You will get paid money to figure out how to make it not break as much.

Listen to your software users and their communities. Or don't listen and receive very public nastygrams. Your choice!

Limits. Your users will find every single spot in your codebase where you didn't think about setting limits.

People really love stickers.

It is thrilling when thousands of people on Twitter immediately notice and comment on a feature you just released. It can also be terrifying and brutal. Sometimes, you should just shut your laptop and try again tomorrow.

You will end up in the news for making a poor choice. Whether you'll repeat that mistake is the true cliffhanger.

It's in your boss's best interest that you succeed as an engineer. Because when you fail, their boss is going to ask them why they failed you.

Code review is harder and perhaps more important than authoring code.

Eventually you'll have 6 years worth of pull requests that you'll have to refer back to, and you'll be glad (or won't) you spent the 5 minutes in the moment of their creation to write up a good summary to help out your future self.

It's never a bad idea to join a company with a bunch of people that are a lot smarter than you. You might be nervous and not as fast in the beginning, but in the long run you're gonna end up looking more and more like those smart people you joined.

Every time you're trying to decide whether to work on your own thing, or help out a coworker with the thing they've asked you for help on, that is an important inflection point and you should stop and think for a minute.

Every startup is resource constrained and has more things to do than people to do them.

Learning how to say no with empathy in different contexts might be the single hardest thing to learn.

Competitors will copy the stuff that you build. Sometimes verbatim, sometimes in spirit.

When that starts happening, that's when you'll be glad (or won't) that you focused so much on hiring and retaining great people that can say "oh yeah? try copying THIS..."

Tone is so difficult to discern from writing, especially when writing happens in a hurry. You will say dumb stuff in chat and be glad (or won't) that you have invested in building strong working relationships with people that know you're just being a moron for this 5 minutes.

Take time off routinely or you will burn out and irritate everyone else around you in the process.