Engineering Engineering: An Intro
How to Build a High Performance Eng Team
TL;DR
This blog series is a practical guide for crypto founders on building and scaling a high performance engineering team
All of my tips are rooted in lessons from building Omni Labs since 2021
Purpose of this blog
My goal is to provide the guidebook I wish I’d had in 2021 - the guidebook that would’ve let me skip over all the bad decisions and build something useful much faster.
There are many highly intelligent technical crypto founders who know a lot about protocol design, and know very little about building an engineering team or building distributed systems at scale. I hope that they can benefit from what I’ve learned and create valuable products for users ASAP.
Context
After a 4 year hiatus, I’m reviving this blog to share insights from my journey building Omni Labs over the past 3 years. The last time I posted a blog here, the world was a very different place – a time before we were tarnished by SBF and the great FTX Fraud, the collapse of 3 Arrows Capital, the death spiral of Terra Luna, the Celsius bankruptcy…
Despite my silence on this blog, I’ve been in the trenches:
Built a DeFi protocol from zero and scaled it to $70m in deposits.
Attempted to migrate it from Ethereum L1 to the L2 ecosystem back when only Optimism and Arbitrum were live – spoiler: it wasn’t great back then, and it’s even worse now.
Pivoted the company to solve exactly the problems we ran into.
Through this journey, I’ve led our engineering team as CTO, culminating in Omni’s mainnet deployment of our Core protocol just a few weeks ago. Omni Core is a cross chain messaging protocol – a complex distributed system of distributed systems – paired with a state layer (EVM). Together, they form half of the Omni Orderflow Engine. We’re far from finished; the second major component of our orderflow engine will be released iteratively over 2025, in addition to many improvements and upgrades to both. But more on that another time.
Along this journey, I made a ton of mistakes.
Reflecting on the past 3 years, I laugh at how naively I saw the world of engineering back in 2021. And that’s great, it means my growth rate is high. I hope that a year from today, I’ll feel the same way about my current self.
Upcoming Topics
Here’s high-level outline of the topics I plan to write about, each grounded in examples from Omni Labs
Code: trunk-based development, feature flags, less is more
Monitoring & Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, incidents, post-mortems
Team building: hiring, interviewing, interns, onboarding, firing
Process: tools, OKRs, DORA, how to use slack, and project management
Culture: DRIs, Kerplunk, Buy vs Build, Definition of Done
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful for the entire Omni Labs engineering team, with special thanks to:
Corver (Principal Engineer) and Fab (Technical PM): they previously hyperscaled Luno from ~10 to ~1000 and have been instrumental in the culture of Omni Engineering
Austin (Co-Founder and CEO) – wouldn’t want anyone else as a cofounder
See you onchain.