Lev Lazinskiy

Daggerversary

I started working at Dagger one year ago today. It flew by! I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past and think about the future.

It’s been a bumpy ride for the last few years. After a successful run at LaunchDarkly I jumped into a couple of companies that didn’t work out. In fact, the last time I celebrated a 1 year work anniversary was in 2018. Despite these setbacks, I thrive in an early stage startup and I was not ready to give up just yet.

A year ago I was looking for three things:

1. A great team to work with
2. A customer problem that I care about
3. A product I believe in

The people at Dagger give me so much energy. I’m honored to be a part of the team and grateful to work with people that care about our customers. For example, a couple of weeks ago I met a company needed Google Auth to log in to Dagger Cloud. I shared the feedback with our team and we shipped Google Auth to production within 24 hours. It’s easy to find find people who know how to do implement Google Auth, its much harder to find people that care enough to do it in 24 hours.

I care about CI more than anyone should. I’ve been thinking about CI ever since I installed Jenkins at Linode 10 years ago to automate patching and distributing custom Linux kernels. I then spent nearly three years working on some of the toughest CI problems at the largest companies in the world as I built out the post-sales solutions team at CircleCI. 10 years have gone by and CI is still as clunky as ever. It’s great to come full circle and work on what Alex calls solving the CI problem once and for all. It’s an ambitious goal, and of course there are skeptics, but it’s been inspiring to see some of the best engineering minds take on this problem and encouraging to see a thriving community form to support us along the way.

The Dagger product has evolved so much over the last year. We launched Dagger Cloud, Daggerverse, Dagger Modules, rewrote Dagger Cloud from the ground up to support Modules in a better way, and continue to deliver valuable improvements every single week. I use Dagger every day, this entire blog is published using a bunch of Dagger modules written in several different languages. It’s not perfect yet, but it makes CI fun, and there are countless people in our community that love Dagger and want to see it succeed. These people motivate me, and give me the fuel I need to make it through the highs and lows of startup life.

The year was full of great memories. It started off with a bang when I got to meeting the whole team in Lisbon Portugal for a weeklong offsite. We were able to build bonds and rapport that I leaned on over the next year. In the spring I went to Paris for the first time and attended KubeCon EU. It was a busy week, we have hundreds of demos at the booth, talked with thousands of people. Watching Solomon give a Keynote to a packed auditorium on the future of software factories was inspiring.

These were both huge events, but the year was full of smaller moments of bonding as well. Working as a team weekly from Shack15 or Solomon’s home office, getting together at meetups, meeting coworkers and customers in person to hack on pipelines, moving tables around with Jeremy.

We just can’t stop moving tables around.

More than anything, what stands out to me are the hundreds of people that I spoke with who continue to deal with an unreasonable amount of toil in their CI/CD pipelines. They feel the pain of the problem we are solving every day and they believe in what we are doing.

The team, product, and community are special. I am lucky to be a part of it and I am so excited to see what the next year brings.