This episode takes us back to the beginning of ReadMe. By asking ReadMe’s earliest employees about the value, Make Things That Just Work, Shinae tries to find out whether the product has an impact on our most important value.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1942051/10097314
This episode takes us back to the beginning of ReadMe. By asking ReadMe’s earliest employees about the value, Make Things That Just Work, Shinae tries to find out whether the product has an impact on our most important value.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1942051/10097314
Before we get into the series, I wanted to let you know that ReadMe is hiring. We looked into what happens when a welcoming and whimsical team meets beautiful API Doc's Unsurprisingly, the result was a beautiful developer experience and an office filled with way too many owls. Over the past year, I've worked at readme, I've learned a lot about API's developer experiences, and also about how to be a good co worker, you can find our current openings at readme.com/careers. Previously on values,
Benak:be the change you seek, if you want to see some kind of change, you should try to go get yourself
Pat Pow-anpongkul:how would we hire more people faster that really aligned with the values of ReadMe
Shinae Lee:is Be the change you seek ReadMe's most important value.
Kirby:For me personally, I don't think I could choose a particular value and save this one is the most important.
Shinae Lee:From ReadMe its values. I'm Shinae Lee. ReadMe has six values. And in this six part investigative podcast, we're going to explore the company to figure out which ReadMe value is the most important. Today we're investigating the value, make things that just work. So to pick up where we left off, last episode, you heard about Be the change you seek and what it means to work at a startup. People had a lot to say about the value. But there wasn't a consensus on whether it was the most important benek and Amy ended up saying that it was our most important value because you get to choose work that's meaningful to you. But there's something missing here. What about the product? Is it really all about the kind of work we do? That's what I'm trying to figure out in today's episode by looking at the value, make things that just work? To figure things out, I talked to people who knew Greg at the beginning of the company, who were here for a lot of its foundation, but most of my knowledge comes from Greg himself. Greg founded the company in 2015. But he had the idea for readme years before, and didn't take on the company's first employees until about a year later. What's great about talking to Greg is that he can chronicle the entire story of readme from the first inception of its idea up until now, he was working at a startup that built an API. And according to Greg building, the API was actually pretty easy. But the hard part was documenting it making it easy to use and getting people to use it. I can confirm this because I have a copy of Greg's diary. He lent it to me, don't worry, it spans the last 15 years. And he first writes about the idea for ReadMe In a July 2008 entry. It reads
Greg (as told by Kanad):dear diary, it's been a while since I've written in, it's been a bit crazy lately. I'm still reeling from the two biggest cultural moments of my lifetime. The season seven finale of scrubs and Rihanna reissuing Good Girl Gone Bad with three new singles. Anyways, I'm done specking out the API. But building the docs for it has been such a pain. There must be some kind of service out there for this right? It makes my life so much easier.
Shinae Lee:But six months later, API Doc's show up again. Here's what it says.
Greg (as told by Kanad):Dear Diary, the hunt for a dev hub platform continues. I'm basically done building out the API docs, but it took way longer than I needed to. And there's no centralized place where everything can go like support forums, topical guides, recipes, things that can make the API experience so much better. This could totally be a company. I recently caught up with Greg about these journal entries on starting a company.
Gregory Koberger:I just had a ton of ideas. But the interesting thing was this one kept coming back to me like every few weeks or months, I couldn't shake it. So it's 2008 and 2010. It came up again, because I was applying for a job at Mozilla, which I ultimately ended up working there. And I talked about it a bunch after that as well, it kept talking about and it just just kept coming up. And actually six or seven years of this, I was kind of like you know, I have a lot of ideas. But this is the one that like after seven years I'm still excited about and I haven't even written a line of code. Like I surprised him some time on it. So as I started reading,
Shinae Lee:API's are so powerful, they can almost give you superpowers. But without the right documentation. Using an API is almost like touching a hot stove. You're always afraid of using one because you know it'll be a little painful,
Marc Cuva:if they're poorly documented, or if it's just six months at a date, but it just might as well not exist because like no one will be able to figure out how to use it.
Shinae Lee:That's my Cuva read means first employee, he now runs product.
Marc Cuva:So by us being able to make it super easy to update, allow anybody to suggest changes, not just the admins, as well as adding features to make the actual documentation better and the API easier to use. It just enables so many more companies and people to be able to like, figure out how to do this stuff, which is really empowering.
Shinae Lee:Now that ReadMe is built, it can abstract away 90% of the work to start good documentation. So in a sense, the whole idea for ReadMe product was built around making something that just worked. But there's another huge aspect to making things that just work. Just like how Greg was missing that API developer tool that he just couldn't find in 2008. He was also missing the company culture that he could only find at his first job. That's not around anymore.
Gregory Koberger:I never was able to kind of find that same culture where people like cared about each other and loved being there. And I think if I had found a startup that I really, really loved, and was similar to the start that I want to that I ultimately kind of created, I would have joined it. I couldn't quite find that the magic anywhere, and I kind of just decided to start it myself.
Shinae Lee:For Greg, creating great developer experiences and creating a great company culture are part of the same passion for creating experiences that just work. So clearly make things that just work is foundational to the company itself. But is it the most important I asked Greg and he wouldn't give me a straight answer. I asked a few others, but again, nothing conclusive. I couldn't shake this feeling though. The feeling like Greg was in telling me something about the value when I asked first, he said it's one of his favorite values. But he also said this, like pick
Gregory Koberger:favorites, but I want to bias your investigation. I'll all you interview everyone and and see what you come up with and see see what we settle on.
Shinae Lee:Okay, I'll let you know. Okay. Is he lying about the importance of the values? The seems suspicious to me and I can't tell if he just isn't thinking that hard about it. Or if maybe he's hiding something more next time