Phil Freo – Full Stack Web Developer

I took my first sabbatical this year, after Close started (generously) offering fully paid 4-week sabbaticals for all employees after 5 years.
Recently I spoke with our CEO, Steli, who just came back from his own sabbatical, about how our sabbaticals went and what we learned. Our conversation was recorded for our company’s internal podcast (we use Castos) but I thought I’d also write up some...

I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:
TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think.
Read on for details & some background…

As an engineering team at @Close, we’re trying to write more about what we are learning/doing. I recently got to dabble in a little coding project, so I wrote it up. This post originally appeared on the Close Engineering Blog here.
We host our main marketing website, close.com, as a static site (in our case, generated via Lektor) served by AWS. We store all the staticly generated files in S3 and have a Cloudfront distribution in front as our CDN....

This is the blog post version of a talk I gave at True University in Berkley, CA in June 2018 to help early stage startups scale their engineering teams from 2 to 20.
Hiring is hard. Really hard. I’ve been hiring on small startup engineering teams for the past 8 years (most recently grown Close.io‘s engineering team from 2 to 14) and hiring really great engineers never gets easy. But it does get easier with practice...