Michael Drogalis

🤯 Wowie. Upgrade to the latest—I've put a TON of work into perf lately!

A few months ago, I stumbled into a customer service hack: respond with a custom, recorded video.

People love a live, but async, explanation of their problem and its solution.

If I was raising money, my pitch deck would have only 3 things:

1. The problem/market, with customer quotes

2. The solution, with customer quotes

3. My business metrics (income statement, profit/loss, KPIs related to customers)

Investors don’t want to see your demo.

They want to see traction.

😊 Wow, I think I just melted. So incredibly kind.

Aw, thanks for saying that! You're gonna do great!

this

Cool! Almost sounds like micro-Antithesis.

Fascinating!

They seem impressive for writing small apps from scratch, but I've yet to hear someone working on a mature, large codebase say it's mindblowing.

If you see one of these posts, know it’s extremely unlikely the author actually knows the root cause of last night's problems—or the solutions to them.

Netflix on-call team: 🫡

🙃 Laughing a bit at how many companies are posting about last night's Tyson/Paul live stream buffering problem, as if their products are the solution Netflix's engineering team is obviously missing.

Yikes, fellow US self-employed people. Healthcare premiums are up through the roof this year. 27% jump over here. :/

Spent the last few days doing my favorite thing: performance engineering. ShadowTraffic is now 3x faster, > 20K messages/s on moderately complex data.

For the Clojure geeks: I ripped out reflection, used transients, and dropped in clj-fast. 🚀

Since it looks like things are booming on Bluesky (hooray!), I'll post here and there too.

Even Secret things!

I mostly write on LinkedIn, where I periodically share Private things, like customer count and revenue—because building in public is so much more fun keeping secrets.

One year after starting, it's now a Real Business. With actual customers and profit and stuff.

I took $0 in outside investment and run the entire thing myself, besides my cat featured in the background of that first photo.

ShadowTraffic Rapidly simulate production traffic to your backend.

8 weeks into my first attempt, I realized I got lucky (and I do mean Lucky) and wouldn't have to try another 3x.

I now run shadowtraffic.io, where I make a product that helps companies simulate production traffic to Kafka (and Postgres, S3, yada yada yada).

Woah, 120+ followers overnight just after joining. I guess I should give a proper hello!

👋 Hi, my name is Michael. One year ago, I left my job in big tech to do something crazy: I attempted to start 4 startups in 4 quarters until one succeeded.

What happened next surprised even me. 🧵

Right on!

Thanks for putting together the starter pack! That was the clincher for me.

Thoroughly ready to get off the blue bird. 🤩