February 2024This week I started a new job as the Head of Marketing at
Objective, Inc. It’s one of those developer tools that just makes you smile when you see it in real time. It’s wild.
It’s the way you smile when you see a magic trick, and you know it can’t be magic. Because physics. But you also don’t have a better explanation. Part of the smile, though, is because you’re already wondering what else you can build.
A long time ago, I started working at a company called Twilio that made me smile the same way.
All 200s Start With 500s.
There were four or five of us then, it was the middle of a recession, and the world hadn’t really decided how it felt about APIs. But compute power was getting cheaper, and web infrastructure was getting more pliable (I will see you in a dark corner of hell,
cgi-bin ). And instead of companies hiring developers to match a compiler license, companies were just hiring smart developers and those developers were bringing their toolbelt full of developer tools to work every day.
For the most part, I looked for the same things in a job then that I look for now — working with people that wanted to be curious more than they wanted to be right, and to work on a product that makes me want to build.
I loved APIs. I still do. I’ve always loved how some developer tools absolutely wreck the narrative that engineers aren’t creative.
A few years ago, at that last job, we asked engineers to rate their own creativity, where creativity was defined pretty broadly. And we asked Engineering Managers to rate the creativity of the Engineers they work with. I added this section to a developer study at the last minute as an afterthought, in large part to validate what I already thought was true. That Engineering is creative and everyone involved agrees. And that it’s just the suits that needed convincing.
Telephony is one of those places where a lot of magic can happen in a POST. I left Twilio after 14 years of being fascinated by the things developers built with the API. Developers tracked the migration of bears with an on-bear SMS-enabled GPS anklet. Developers built an app that detected early-onset Parkinson’s disease by identifying barely-audible warbles in voice recordings from a diagnostic
phone call over 8kHz PSTN. Developers built SMS reminders for people taking timing-dependent HIV medication in parts of the world where mobile phones don’t have reliable timeclock service. And Developers built a crisis support hotline so trans kids had someone to turn to when they didn’t have anyone safe left in their lives.
But the results of that extra section I added to the developer study knocked me over. Overwhelmingly,
and with statistical confidence, that sample of Engineers didn’t believe they were very creative at all. But that sample of Engineering
Managers believed the Engineers they worked with were incredibly creative.
And even still, I can’t tell you how many engineers I’ve seen smile that way over the years when a developer tool feels sufficiently magical. That’s just creativity about to happen.
We Can’t Wait to See What You Build.
The kind of people attracted to working at an API company are, generally, the kind of people who genuinely can’t wait to see what you build. It changes the contract with the community you’re a part of. You build so that someone else can amplify their ideas. Luthiers make violins so that someone else makes music. It’s a creative, and a brutally precise job. Steaming and warping and carving wood in tight tolerances only to then put it under 20 pounds of string tension for the rest of its life.
But there hadn’t been an API, or an API company that had made me smile in a long time.
And then there was this search company,
Objective.
Multimodal search is another one of those places where a lot of magic can happen in a POST. We all intuitively know what good search feels like. And we all know what bad search feels like, because we’ve all built bad lexical search in a pinch (I will also see you in hell, MYSQL
INSTR() ). Seeing
real multi-modal search live in an API for the first time was another one of those moments for me. Where all you can do is smile at the magic.
And the team at Objective checked the boxes for me. A team full of people more interested in being curious than right, and a product that makes me excited to build.
In my 20 years building developer brands, I’ve never been more excited about helping convince more developers how creative they can be when they get the right tools in their toolbelt.
And I really can’t wait to see what you build.