Blog

Articles and talks on Growth Engineering, experimentation, and tech leadership

89 total posts

Why Growth Engineering Practices Don't Transfer to Product Engineering

March 25, 2025

Should marathoner runners train like sprinters? While there are probably some interesting cross-training opportunities, the two are fundamentally different.

A Year of Remote Async

October 15, 2024

I spent a year advising a company that banned slack and most meetings. Here's what I learned.

The 4 Kinds of Software Engineers you'll find at a startup

September 10, 2024

Software engineers are not a monolith. Some don't even _like_ bouldering.

How Rajiv Desai Scaled Growth Engineering at Dropbox

August 22, 2024

Within four years, Rajiv made Growth a top destination for Engineers at Dropbox. Here's how.

Lessons Learned teaching Growth Engineering at Reforge

August 16, 2024

The course should be more in-the-weeds on eng, more async, and have more time for questions.

When is it time to replace Landing Page Builder?

June 16, 2024

Later than you'd think: Landing Page Builders like Instapage or Unbounce are the Kallax of MarTech tools

Why I'm teaching Growth Engineering at Reforge

April 06, 2024

Somebody should teach Growth to Engineers. I'll do it.

2023: A Year in Review

December 20, 2023

What did Alexey learn from his first year of full-time part-time advising?

Should this be an A/B Test?

November 26, 2023

Before you A/B test, explore / its aptness with these questions four

How to Build a Growth Engineering team that Wins

September 27, 2023

A dedicated growth engineering team can have a significant impact on a business's trajectory. If executed properly, this team will consistently drive target metrics to increase by 10% or more every quarter.

Statistical Significance on a Shoestring Budget

September 11, 2023

Many startups experience a chicken-and-egg problem with growth: they want to run experiments to gain more volume, but lack the volume for experiments to be practical.

There's no such thing as Organic Traffic

April 04, 2023

I too would rather live in a world where this was still a thing.

Unshackling Marketing from Engineering Bottlenecks: A Primer

March 14, 2023

We've had these new landing pages mocked up for the last two months! All of our research says the new pages will be a huge conversion lift. Can you talk to the engineering team and see what the holdup is?

Introducing: A Retirement Program for Technical Co-Founders

March 09, 2023

Exhausted from running your startup? Burnt out, losing friends and hair, gaining weight and wrinkles?

Avoid Premature Optimization: Growth Advice for Early Stage Founders

March 08, 2023

Early-stage founders often ask what I could do for them, and how they might go about spinning up a growth team.

The Alexey Test: 11 steps to better Growth Engineering

March 07, 2023

Growth Engineering is a growing profession these days. But before you accept a shiny new job as a Growth Engineer, you should figure out the state of the Growth org.

Why Core Product Engineers can't Hack it on Growth

March 03, 2023

Early-stage founders often ask what I could do for them, and how they might go about spinning up a growth team.

Hamtips, or why I still run the Technical Phone Screen as the Hiring Manager

September 15, 2021

It stands for “Hiring Manager Technical Phone Screen.” Since you asked, I’ve been pronouncing it “ham-tips.” It’s the call a candidate will have after their RPS (Recruiter Phone Screen) but before their onsite.

A toolset for tackling technical debt

April 01, 2021

Not what you want to hear as the freshly-appointed Engineering Manager on a critical team. Leadership expects the team to deliver on key new features, but also, *there better not be any voluntary churn

Technical Interview Superforcasters

December 05, 2020

The new VP wants us to double engineering’s headcount in the next six months. If we have a chance in hell to hit the hiring target, you seriously need to reconsider how fussy you’ve become.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Front-end Tracking

July 14, 2020

I'm here to warn you about the dangers of front-end user tracking. Not because Google is tracking you, but because it doesn't track you quite well enough.

Lessons Learned: Giving Feedback as an Engineering Manager

June 20, 2020

Earlier in the year, I became the Engineering Manager on a team responsible for half of the outages at our 2,000 person company. After each incident, the on-call engineer would write-up a doc and schedule a meeting.

Working Remotely Crossed the Chasm on May 12, 2020

May 12, 2020

From academia to the Open Source movement, remote collaboration is not exactly novel. From Github to DuckDuckGo, remote-first successful businesses are no longer rare.

Confessions of a Deadbeat Open Source Maintainer

May 06, 2017

The year was 2013, Meteor was the hip new kid on the block and Coffeescript was a reasonable JS dialect choice. We were fresh out of college. Meteor was hosting their first 'Summer Hackathon' in San Francisco on 10th and Minna, and we figured this was our shot.

Test Driven Interviewing

May 06, 2017

TDD forces you into the ideal mindset for nailing down (1) problem definitions. There's no better way to properly grok a problem than to have to think through all the fun ways an implementation could be slightly off.

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back: 2016 in review

January 03, 2017

Here's how becoming sedentary and employed has turned out so far, relative to expectations.

Dependonate: Donate to your dependencies

March 10, 2016

Giving back to open source projects you benefit from is one of those obviously-good-in-theory-confusing-in-practice ideas, like eating healthy or being carbon-neutral.

Flystein saved me over 1000 dollars on flight costs and all they got was this blog post

October 05, 2015

I spent about half an hour on Skyscanner and Google Flights, and couldn’t find flights for less than about $3,000. Which is a lot. At roughly the same time, Vlad from Flystein reached out and offered to help Hacker Paradise participants book flights. So I tried the service out.

Hackathon - A retrospective - a talk

June 22, 2015

in February about a hackathon we ostensibly threw.

Did I say Estonia? I meant Costa Rica

August 01, 2014

I'm putting Estonia on hold - still excited to go there, and hoping to do so in April or May, once it warms up again.

When visas turn into pumpkins

July 03, 2014

My US work visa runs out in a month, so I'm leaving for about a year to go travel. I start on August 2014.

Hackonomics 101

February 04, 2014

I helped organize HackCon, a conference for student hackathon organizers, this past weekend in NY.

Houston Admin Talk at Meteor Devshop 10

December 19, 2013

I gave a talk at the latest Meteor Devshop a couple of weeks ago about Houston, the Django-Admin like tool that Greg, Geoff and I are working on for Meteor.

The last 10 months

October 20, 2013

2013 hasn't been a great year for new content on this blog. Let me try to change that.

Migrating Divvy configurations between computers

June 18, 2013

I've been using Divvy the tiling tool for OSX (and windows) ever since I switched to using Macs full-time in 2010. It's great.

The Art of Rejection

April 07, 2013

At an event last week, I was introduced to the CEO of a post series-A startup I'd been following and found quite interesting. We spoke about his company for a few minutes, and he asked me to email him in case there were any opportunities for me as a freelancer to help.

Start-ups are hard: Lessons learned in 2012

February 24, 2013

Fourteen months ago, in my last semester of college, I began working on a start-up idea with a few folks I had met through school. The company we started is off to a good start.

Hackathon Hacks for Organizers

October 12, 2012

To that end, here are some hackathon hacks I've noticed or come up with over the past few years. If you're working on putting together your next hackathon, I hope they help!

How PennApps Labs Came to Be

August 26, 2012

Cobol on Rails was built in PHP and mySQL. It was the first serious web project that a few friends and I undertook.

FundersClub: getting Crowdfunding right

August 12, 2012

If you can't get the top-tier companies, you can't get the companies that follow whatever top-tier companies do. You end up with wanterpreneurs tricking Grandmas out of their paychecks. You've already lost.

Being safe with mongodb

August 05, 2012

A quick public service announcement about MongoDB, for those of us new to NoSQL land

Sidecar and Digital Reputation Systems

July 29, 2012

Yes, if you're looking for Uber-like service at Taxi-like prices and aren't made uncomfortable by just how sketchy the whole thing feels.

My $370 Adjustable Sit-Stand Desk Setup

July 22, 2012

that results in an email asking where one buys such a thing. One buys such a thing on amazon.

Weekend Hack: A Markov Baby Name Generator

July 15, 2012

a Markov Chain is a simple random process to generate text that looks sort of like other text.

Non-Technical Hiring, Lessons Learned

July 07, 2012

Our application form included several paragraph answers, forcing candidates to think and allowing me to evaluate their writing style. This proved very helpful.

Migrating from Posterous to Jekyll on GitHub Pages

July 01, 2012

I may be a bit late to the Jekyll party, but with Posterous being acquired by twitter a few months ago, I figured why not try it out. Two weekends later I've migrated enough that I'm comfortable shipping, though I imagine a bunch of silly bugs will remain.

My first time with an Exec

June 18, 2012

I tried Exec for the first time today.    TL;DR - don't half-ass the task description/understanding what you actually need. Motivation:I had found a blog post with a ton of discussion...

A blog post a week, or the beer's on you: Iron Blogger SF

June 10, 2012

I showed up at stumbled upon was tricked into an Iron Blogger SF meetup on Saturday, and was not allowed to have any of the beer until I found out what the...

Don't take your highest-paying internship offer

May 19, 2012

"Well, I wasn't really going to intern at X (say, Zynga, or Morgan Stanley) but they offered more than anybody else." Don't do that. It's easy to focus on the...

So those co-founder slides turned into a TechCrunch article

April 15, 2012

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/stop-looking-for-a-technical-co-founder/ A pretty surreal/cool experience. I should expand on the process at some point.

A brief guide to tech internships

January 30, 2012

Planning to be an Intern in the Bay Area during Summer 2012? Make sure to read an Intern's Guide to the Bay Area, and join the 2012 Facebook group.  (via this guy, via this...

Don't make me wait for bags at the airport, just deliver them.

January 17, 2012

The flight landed at 11:18 pm. The first bags came out 40 minutes later. Mine came out just after midnight, so about 48 minutes after landing. People were pissed off,...

Cool Story, Bro: Stephan from Kembrel

December 22, 2011

I've known about Kembrel in a sort of by-the-way, there's-also-this-clothing-company sort of way for a few years now (I think I walked by a Kembrel physical sale last year), but never bothered...

Post-Finals Doughnuts and Hot Cocoa: This is obvious, but...

December 19, 2011

[Context: I'm one of the Dining Philosophers, the Computer Science Club at Penn] InterviewStreet offered to sponsor a Study Break to help promote their upcoming CodeSprint.  We contemplating doing a study...

Finding a Technical Cofounder: Slides from talk

November 14, 2011

I gave a talk to the Wharton MBA E-club (I think?) earlier today about the difficulties of finding a technical co-founder.  If I find the time, should probably turn this...

The Mentorship Checklist: 9 questions for your potential employer

November 01, 2011

You: a CS student looking for your first or second part-time job while in school, eager to try some of this ‘programming’ stuff in the real world. Them: Somebody you're...

Twelve apps to transform you into a more tech-savvy [Penn] student

September 28, 2011

I'm a DP columnist this semester, writing once every two weeks for the school newspaper on technology and entrepeneurship.  The below is a reasonably useful list of applications that students...

An Intern's Guide to a Summer in the Bay Area

August 23, 2011

Dear Future Intern, Welcome! You just got an internship at this amazing start-up, so you're starting to look for housing and are getting pumped for your summer. Rightfully so -...

Realizing Rewards from your Hackathon Sponsorship

July 30, 2011

So, you've handed over some hard-earned cash to sponsor a hackathon - awesome! On behalf of hackathon organizers everywhere, thank you.  Let's make sure you maximize your return on investment....

Sure, let's be LinkedIn friends

July 14, 2011

TL;DR: Friend everybody you can on LinkedIn, then write recommendations for people you actually feel you can endorse. I've struggled to keep my LinkedIn connections limited to people who I...

Is Federated Social Networking going to happen?

June 18, 2011

This isn't quite polished enough to be a blog post, but I'm putting it up for now to make sure the idea is out there. Release early, release often, right?...

Introducing: CIS@Penn Bloggers RSS/Twitter Account

June 13, 2011

There are quite a few impressive bloggers within Penn's CS community.  Now, thanks to Yahoo Pipes and twitterfeed it's possible to get everybody in one place: Subscribe via RSS | @PennCIS on Twitter Email...

Hosting Hackathons: The Organizer's Checklist

June 03, 2011

This is a second in series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps, as well as from participating in HackNY and PhillyGameJam...

Venmo Review: It's like your wallet and your phone had a beautiful baby

May 17, 2011

"The future is here. It's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson Venmo is something of a futurist's dream except that it just so happens to actually exist. Simply put,...

Hosting Hackathons: The Team

May 15, 2011

This is a second in series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps, as well as from participating in HackNY and PhillyGameJam and the hackathons at Facebook over the...

Getting started with Web Development: what you need to know.

April 30, 2011

[Edit - I consider this post to be pretty out of date (don't start with PHP anymore!) but have not yet updated it.  The one-line answer today would be to...

Dear Dr Stallman, the Aftermath

April 24, 2011

Whoa.  Thanks for all the attention and feedback, everybody! In case you're curious: I ended up emailing the letter to RMS and got a reply earlier today. I am skeptical...

Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

April 21, 2011

Dear Dr. Stallman, Thank you for coming to Penn and giving a talk on A Free Digital Society; it was an honor meeting you. You mentioned that what you expected of...

@Bluffn from HackNY

April 12, 2011

I was at HackNY over the weekend; our resulting demo is below (starting at the 9 minute mark). Given a chance, I'm hoping to put together a longer article about solid...

Permission Denied for chmod: Cygwin on Windows 7 doesn't play nice with files in Dropbox

April 06, 2011

I spent a fair amount of time earlier today trying to set up todo.txt with Cygwin on my Windows 7 boot. For the longest time, I was getting "Permission Denied"...

Daily Deals: Everybody's favorite bubble

April 04, 2011

In case anybody else is keeping count, there are now two Groupon clones focused specifically on the Penn market: CrowdQuest and Lootsa.   These bring to mind Lewis Black's End of the Universe:...

Cool Story, Bro: Haig and Jason from WineAccess.com

March 25, 2011

When I started this blog, I was hoping to do a bunch of New Yorker-style profiles of cool Enterpreneurs that I got to meet, only considerably shorter and worse. Here's my first....

Recruiting Penn Engineers Talk

March 21, 2011

The Interactive Media Group, (Wharton's undergraduate Social Media guys) invited me to speak about WSCM and working with Penn Engineers. Here are the slides from my talk: Working with Penn Engineers...

The 'go' command

March 15, 2011

Zach Wasserman created something I've been wanting for a long time and have been to lazy to implement myself: the 'go' command. Often, I'll be looking for some file on the...

Recruiting Penn Engineers: A Case Study

March 06, 2011

In http://alexeymk.com/recruiting-penn-engineers-intro-emails-that-d, I promised a case study.  Here goes.   For a bit of background, John of Jarv.us was introduced by a mutual friend seeking advice on how to attract...

Hosting Hackathons: Getting Awesome Sponsors

February 28, 2011

This is a first in a (hopefully) series of posts on how to host a student hackathon, based on my experience with PennApps, as well as from participating in HackNY and...

Recruiting Penn Engineers: Getting intro emails right.

February 12, 2011

The quality of emails to the cis-ugrad list-serv has received a fair amount of attention recently.  Making fun of clueless wanterpreneurs is good fun, but as many in the CS community have...

The Bay Area is Awesome

February 08, 2011

I spent Thurs-Sun of this past week in the Bay Area, interviewing for potential places to contribute to this summer and just generally meeting cool and interesting people. Let me...

The recruiting email that wasn't

January 28, 2011

Here's an email I'd like to see: Hello there, I am contacting you on behalf of a next-generation Social Networking start-up that is looking for some ninja coders who know...

Technical Jobs on Campus: thedp.com

January 28, 2011

Here's something I've been meaning to do for a while: post a filtered list of worthwhile coding job openings on campus and around. Openings are going to be limited to...

Product Design Ideas from OPIM 415

January 24, 2011

I'm taking Product Design with Karl Ulrich this semester. As part of the class, we have to come up with and outline 5 potential (physical) products targetted towards college students...

Too cool for tungle.me?

January 22, 2011

I've been using tungle.me for about a year now. The service lets users post their availability publicly (tungle.me/Alexey), letting users send emails like "Sure, let's get coffee next week. My...

Loose Ties Link Ships: Friending norms on LinkedIn

December 31, 2010

If you look at my LinkedIn account, it would seem like I'm not a particularly active user; I've only got 79 74 connections and no picture.  Here's the thing: I'm not...

Recruiting Penn Engineers: Who we are, how to reach us

December 28, 2010

I gave a talk at BarCamp Philly a couple of months back about best practices in hiring technical (mostly CS) interns from Penn. I've since distilled the talk into bitesize pieces...

Flipping Coins through Mechanical Turk: Part 2

December 19, 2010

Professor Jason Dana and I have been experimenting with Cheating and Turker Quality on Mechanical Turk. If you haven't yet, check out Part 1. Thanks for everybody's feedback so far...

Flipping Coins through Mechanical Turk: Part 1

December 18, 2010

Over the past semester, I participated in an Independent Study in Behavioral Economics with Professor Jason Dana.  Here's what we've been up to: Mechanical Turk is Amazon's 'artificial artificial intelligence'...

xs:anyURI requires ampersands to be escaped

November 28, 2010

Quick heads-up, in case anybody else runs into this problem. Background: I've been working with passing an ExternalQuestion to MechanicalTurk, and have learned (the hard way) that the 'ExternalURL' component,...

.h file generator

November 02, 2010

TL; DR: want to auto-generate .h files from .c files? Type this into vim. C sucks. [Disclaimer: OK, I don't like C; I'm a python/functional languages guy. You may love...

First! (also, a placeholder)

October 03, 2010

This is going to be the personal/professional blog of Alexey Komissarouk (that'd be me)