This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 7 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Sentry – Session Replay! Rewind and replay every step of the user’s journey before and after they encountered an issue. Eliminate the guesswork and get to the root cause of an issue, faster. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Rachel Potvin – GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Rachel adores EngFlow (investor and advisor) Rachel’s 2016 paper on Google’s developer infrastructure Harvard Business Review on Psychological Safety Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Rachel Potvin, SVP of Engineering at Sanity, shares insights on scaling teams, healthy engineering culture, startup planning, and the differences between big tech and startups. She discusses her experiences at Google, GitHub, and Sanity, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned throughout her career journey.

Rachel Potvin, VP Engineering at GitHub, shares tips on maintaining developer productivity in rapidly scaling teams. Topics include team productivity metrics, future architecture approach, prioritizing build queues, and creating a developer-friendly work environment. Also discussed are tools for productivity and security, building the Time Machine feature, reflections on open source, and remote work challenges.