We’re launching the Zonky developer site

I finally got around to launching our developer site. The main reason is to share our experiences, observations and other things that would otherwise stay with us for no good reason.

We run a program of education sessions, or edu, a concept I came across while working at Systinet. Developers suggest topics they’d like to hear about or can speak on. When we can’t cover a subject in-house, we bring in experts from other companies. We record every edu session, and the recordings are on our YouTube channel.

We’re happy to share what we’ve learned when conference and meetup organizers or anyone putting on a public event asks us to speak. The invitations tend to be scattered across different systems, though. The developer site gives you an idea of what interests us, and you’re welcome to invite us to your company.

I’d like to give you a look inside in two areas. One is our engineering culture, and the other is the technologies and approaches we use. Transparency is one of our company values, so we’ll also share our fuckups and the postmortems we try to write. Where better to publish those than on our developer site?

Of course, altruism is only part of it. Besides helping us build Zonky’s engineering brand and making hiring easier, it gives our developers a chance to learn public speaking. It’s one of the key skills that will help them later in their careers.

Why Medium over WordPress or Blogger? Medium is simple but powerful and needs neither hosting nor maintenance on our part. We use software as a service all the time at Zonky. It’s our preferred approach because it lets us focus on publishing. Plenty of companies, including 37signals, Airbnb and Google, use Medium for the same purpose, a developer site.

I hope you’ll follow our developer site. Once we reach 100 followers, I’ll send you the newsletter I write for our developers every week.