Exponentially High times.

This is not a post about legal weed in Colorado and Washington. This is a post about the current status of our company Pagely and more specifically about how fucking thrilled I am to have our new CTO Josh Eichorn join our team.

There is some often regurgitated saying you hear that goes something like “A great developer is 100x more productive than an average one.” Whatever, fill in your own blanks. That moral of the meme is that a skilled programmer/engineer is exponentially better then an average one

Exponentially.

Pagely is a little over 4yrs old as an entity/brand and nearly 8 years old as a product. Managed WordPress Hosting started here, and our new CTO was the architect of it when he worked for us in 2006 as a contractor and built the prototype that became Pagely.

In 8 years since, Pagely was expanded and maintained, primarily by a very average developer: me. I had some help along the way, some of them more average than me, but all were very much average. Through it all though we made a great product that has achieved amazing things. Our historical learnings of what works and what does not work for hosting WordPress at scale are thick, even if the lines of code that processed it were less then perfect.

This summer we were fortunate to hire Josh back as CTO. He packed his family up and moved back to Arizona from the East Bay to shape the technical destiny of Pagely.\r\n\r\nIn the last 3 months or so, the backend infrastructure and site deployment/management tools at Pagely have undergone a dramatic transformation.

• Legacy Technical Debt: Paid.
• Site Performance: Vastly improved.
• Service Uptime: Vastly improved, even while migrating thousands of sites over and debugging along the way.
• Costs: Cut in half.
• New systems/features: Game changing

It boggles my mind the difference in production, execution, and results that are achieved by a skilled and passionate engineer vs. an average one.

Exponentially.

My name is Joshua Strebel and I am a very average developer. I stopped pretending to be better than I am and invited a great engineer to take over, and it is exponentially the best business decision I have made thus far.