Sunil Sadasivan

Sunil Sadasivan

A collection of 26 posts

OpenOct 25, 2016
How One Tweet Changed My Perception of Two Little Words

A lesson I’ve learned over the past four years building and growing the team at Buffer is how important awareness is to self-improvement . I’m starting to think awareness is the tough part. Most of the battle for learning, growing and improving is being aware of what to improve. When I joined Buffer, I was surrounded by a team that values self-improvement and

ReportsSep 7, 2016
Learning from a System Outage, Our First Hackdays and Engineering Team News

Buffer Engineering Report August 2016 * Last month’s report * All Engineering reports * All Buffer reports Key stats Requests for buffer.com 68.3m Avg. response for buffer.com 220ms Requests for api.bufferapp.com 944m Avg. response for api.bufferapp.com 88.1 ms Bugs & Quality * 2 S1 (severity 1) bug reports – 2 closed 100% (In July: 9 S1 Bug reports – 6 closed 66%) * 24 S2 (severity 2) reports – 17 Closed 71% (In July: 38 S2 reports – 23 Closed 61%) Welcome to this

ReportsAug 3, 2016
Engineering Innovation Ahead: Instagram, Redux, Snackchats

See all past engineering reports → See all Buffer reports → Engineering Report July 2016 Welcome to our first innovation & engineering report! We’ll be sharing all the highlights from engineering and technical teams at Buffer. These includes snippets from our product engineering, data, systems and architecture teams. This past month has seen a major product launch, Redux building, diving deeper into service-oriented architecture and also internal webinars called “Snackchats.” Here’s

OpenApr 28, 2016
Are You Creating Forward Motion Or Stop Energy?

Buffer is now the largest team I’ve ever worked with. This time last year there were 29 people on the team. Today there are more than 80. Hyper-growth mode is both exciting and scary because it means a new chapter and challenges. One thing that’s been on my mind is how can we keep our startup mindset as we keep growing. I have been seeking advice from a few people I look up to, and last September I chatted with Greg

Building Slack /slash commands with AWS Lambda

When AWS Lambda came out last year I was amazed.  The thought never occurred to me that web development doesn’t need to be complex, instead it can be about purely accomplishing the task at hand.  While they’re relatively early still, I think AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway, are great examples of where web development is headed. If you haven’t experimented with AWS Lambda yet, I’d definitely recommend doing so.  Essentially it’s a model of web development in which

What Michigan Wolverines Basketball Taught Me About Hiring at Buffer

I’ve been a college basketball fan for as long as I can remember. Sports teams are like any other organization: They strive to organize individuals to accomplish shared challenges and goals. As a Michigan Wolverines fan, I’m continually inspired by how Michigan’s coach, John Beilein , accomplishes these goals. Beilein is the only active collegia

OverflowDec 2, 2014
Why We Prioritize Culture Fit Over Technical Interviews In Hiring Developers

In the year and a half that I’ve focused on hiring at Buffer, I’ve received more than 2,000 applications for engineering roles. Of those applicants, 70 have gone on to interviews, and we’ve grown from a team of 2 to 10 engineers. Learning how to hire great people is one of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. I’ve iterated on our process for hiring engineers and I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my lessons. Here’s my first post on our hiring process and why we no longer have the tra

OpenSep 2, 2014
Mike San Román is Buffer’s Newest Web Developer

I’m so happy to announce that Mike San Román will be joining our team as our next web developer! Mike will be focusing on our Buffer for Business offering. In the short time Mike has been working with us, he’s accomplished quite a lot. Mike focused on understanding our Business customers through survey forms and running various experiments. He’s also implemented some key performance improvements including client side caching with IndexedDB. Since launching our

OpenAug 25, 2014
Michael Erasmus is Buffer’s Newest Backend Hacker

I’m pleased to announce that Michael Erasmus has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is now on board full time as our backend/full-stack developer focused on growth at Buffer!Michael has been such a pleasure to work with.  His recent passion lies in data science, and he’s been leading the exploratory analysis that our growth team is doing at Buffer. He also built out what we call ’seamless’ experiments.  Seamless is a way for us to conduct A/B tests

OpenAug 20, 2014
Tom Redman is Buffer’s New Android Developer

I’m pleased to announce that Tom Redman has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is joining us full-time as Buffer’s Android Developer! And I’m super pumped to announce that this means we are now 100% focused on building out our Android app! For the longest time, our Android app was on the back burner as I would switch between Android and backend development.  Tom has been the man to bring Android to the forefront!In the short time that Tom has been on b

How Buffer Uses MongoDB to Power Our Growth Platform

At Buffer , every product decision we make is driven by quantitative metrics. We have always sought to be lean in our decision making, and one of the core tenants of being lean is launching experimental features early and measuring their impact. Buffer is a social media tool to help you schedule and space out your posts on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin. We started in late 2010 and thanks to a keen focus on analytical data, we have now

OverflowJun 11, 2014
How to Think About Security at Startups: It’s a Never-Ending Job

In late October 2013, Buffer suffered a major security breach. As a startup of 8 people at the time, I’ll admit, security wasn’t a top priority on our minds. Our approach when it came to security was to checkmark the basics like setting up proper firewalls, enforcing SSL, and salt+hashing passwords. Going through a security breach changes your perspective on this. We made a huge mistake by doing the minimum. Since that fateful day we’ve completely revamped how we approach our application securi

From Android Contractor to CTO: My Story As An Engineer

In August 2012, my cofounders and I decided to pull the plug on Fancite, the startup I had been working on for over a year and half. Making that call was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. Sunil and the C-suite, South Africa The days that followed were highly existential. Initially, I was relieved and excited about doing something new, however as a few days passed my (perceived) reality hit me: “I wasted all that time building something that achieved nothing.” I remember being filled

OpenMay 23, 2014
From Android Contractor to CTO: My Story As An Engineer

In August 2012, my cofounders and I decided to pull the plug on Fancite , the startup I had been working on for over a year and half. Making that call was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. The days that followed were highly existential. Initially, I was relieved and excited about doing something new, however as a few days passed my (perceived) reality hit me: “I wasted all that time building somethi

ReportsMay 8, 2014
Buffer’s April Engineering Report: New Happiness Dashboard, New iOS App and 20+ Vulnerabilities Patched

Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer.  We really stepped up our game on the security front.  We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked • Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features • No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups • 1 new offer made, and 6

OverflowMay 6, 2014
Buffer’s April Engineering Report: New Happiness Dashboard, New iOS App and 20+ Vulnerabilities Patched

Coming off of the momentum we had in March, April was another solid month for the engineering team at Buffer.  We really stepped up our game on the security front.  We’ve also made strides to better scale Buffer, overhauled the ios7 app, and continued making progress with hiring. Here’s a tl;dr of how April looked * Over 20 security vulnerabilities were patched and we released some awesome security features * No systemwide downtime (win!) but still had a few hiccups * 1 new offer made, an

OpenApr 30, 2014
Meet The Single Line of Code That Generates Nearly $4 Million a Year

At the core of how Buffer schedules posts is one line of a cronjob configuration that hasn’t been touched since the very start when Joel founded Buffer. We still rely on that single cronjob that runs every minute of every day. While this configuration is the same, everything else around it has evolved. Today, Buffer schedules on average 300 posts per minute and over 432,000 posts a day. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and iterations we’ve made to the core of wha

OpenApr 23, 2014
Dan Farrelly is Buffer’s Newest Front-End Engineer

I’m so excited to announce that Dan Farrelly is Buffer’s next engineer! Dan now lives in San Antonio and has been tremendous in helping us further our front-end.  The thing that amazes me the most is how Dan is completely self-taught.  He started in Civil Engineering, previously working in construction management and made the switch to web development.  He worked at Slated, a startup that connects independent filmmakers with investors, before joining Buffer. In Dan’s short time at Buffer he’s

ReportsApr 16, 2014
Buffer’s March Engineering Report: 5 Whys, Reliability, Open Source, and More

March was an incredible month for the engineering team at Buffer.  Looking back, it’s pretty exciting to see what all we’ve accomplished for moving the ball forward and how we’ve executed on some of our engineering goals.  Here are some stats and tl;dr for March: * 1 person converted to full-time (yay Dan Farrelly !) * 6 “5 whys” conducted * 1 new open source project started * 15 minutes of system wide downtime * Switched to New Relic for platform monitor

Zach Flower is Part of The Buffer team!

While this is a bit overdue, I am still so happy to share that in February, Zach Flower has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp and accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time! Zach lives in Boulder, Colorado and in the past has worked at Mocavo and PhotoBucket. In such a short time Zach has had a huge impact on the Buffer backend. He has improved our internal metrics framework, implemented real-time Twitter analytics for our business customers using Site Streams [https://dev.tw

Meet The Single Line of Code That Generates Nearly $4 Million a Year

At the core of how Buffer schedules posts is one line of a cronjob configuration that hasn’t been touched since the very start when Joel founded Buffer. We still rely on that single cronjob that runs every minute of every day. While this configuration is the same, everything else around it has evolved. Today, Buffer schedules on average 300 posts per minute and over 432,000 posts a day. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and iterations we’ve made to the core of wha

ReportsMar 11, 2014
The Buffer February Engineering Report

February was an exiting time for the engineering team at Buffer. Here are some of the numbers at a high level. * 2 new engineers joined the team (1 Growth Engineer, 1 Front-end) * 10,243,834 updates were posted to social networks in February * 0 mins of system wide outage (woohoo!) * 10 minutes of web dashboard outage * 405 ms: Our average api response time SSL and other security improvements We continued with our momentum with our security improvements in February. The Hall of Fame [htt

ReportsFeb 5, 2014
The January Engineering Report at Buffer: Growing the Team, Security Changes, Hiring and more

As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer.  We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing.  As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer!Let’s start off with a brief summary: * We had 355 people apply for engineering positions at Buffer * 2 new engineers joined the team and 2 more offers were made * We launched 1 new Open Source project with Share.JS * There were

OverflowFeb 1, 2014
The January Engineering Report at Buffer: The first one! Looking forward to a great 2014

As you may know, transparency is one of the key values at Buffer.  We’re striving to be fully open about how Buffer and how our happiness team is doing.  As we’ve finished the first month of 2014, I’m happy to introduce the first monthly Engineering Report at Buffer! Engineering Goals One of the first things Joel and I did at the start of this month was reflect back on how 2013 went and set down some key goals for 2014.   At a high level, here are the most important ones. Transparency As a