Episode #73: Optimizing for Maintainability with Joe Emison

About Joe Emison

Joe is a serial technical co-founder, recently launching his fifth company, Branch, in 2017. His previous ventures have been BuildFax, Spacefu, BluePrince, and EphPod. Additionally, he has consulted with many other companies on software development and cloud migrations, including many in the DMGT portfolio. Joe graduated with degrees in English and Mathematics from Williams College and has a law degree from Yale Law School.

Twitter: twitter.com/JoeEmison
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/joemastersemison
Blog: emison.org

Branch Insurance: ourbranch.com

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tGwGxfczaJ4

Transcript:

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Joe Emison. Hey, Joe. Thanks for joining me.

Joe: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Jeremy: So, you are the co-founder and CTO of Branch Insurance. I'd love it if you could tell the audience a little bit about your background and what Branch Insurance does.

Joe: Absolutely. I am a serial technical entrepreneur. Branch is my sixth adventure. Branch is a home and auto insurance company and we also sell renters and umbrella. There are two things that make us completely unique in the United States. One of them is we sell the home and auto as a bundle much more easily than anybody else. So really, anywhere else you would go to buy the home and auto bundle, you'd have to buy one and then the other, and it would take you somewhere between 45 minutes and two hours or maybe a week, and you'd get a lot of fake prices along the way. You'd get like, “Well, we think it's about this.” Okay, I need more information. Then, “It's about this.” We will sell you the home and auto together and for most people, we just need your name and address to give you a real price that you can buy instantly.

Jeremy: Awesome. Well, the thing I think that is probably the most interesting to the listeners is the fact that Branch Insurance is entirely serverless.

Joe: It is. This is actually the third company I've started fully serverlessly. Branch, from the beginning, has been built on Amazon's AppSync service. It uses Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudFront, and a bunch of other third-party services that we love.

Jeremy: Awesome. All right. I have been watching your presentations. I've seen you at Serverless Conf. I've seen you at a couple of other conferences. One of the things that I always thought was fascinating is how you're always recommending some third-party service. You've got a third-party service for everything. Now, obviously some of those are our AWS services, but then you use other things like BigQuery and Stripe, and these other ones, and all these other different things. I was trying to think of something clever. We always talk about stuff like serverless first or static first or whatever. I was thinking that your approach was very much so like third-party first, but then after talking to you about it, it's more about optimizing for maintainability than it is just using some third-party service. What is that that you do, especially at Branch, to optimize for maintainability?

Joe: We think about optimizing for maintainability having two central categories. The first is the less you have to maintain, the easier it is to maintain and so in that bucket goes things like a code is a liability, so less code to maintain is easier to maintain. Or running VMs and containers and having DevOps as a core competency that you need. If you don't need it, you run serverless or you need less of it, then that's also easier to maintain. Then there's another bucket which is how do we not be blockers for all of the other departments in the company? We constantly ask this question of how do we empower other departments to go do what they need to do without talking to tech, without talking to product.

Jeremy: I love that idea of empowering other departments. One of the things that I often see when I'm collecting links from my newsletter is people who write these posts that say they're using Google, for example, I'm sorry, Google Sheets as a backend database for something. Some people criticize it, but for the right application, it makes a lot of sense because then someone can actually go in as somebody who doesn't have the ability to query my SQL database or go into DynamoDB or something like that. Can go in and just manipulate some cells in a database and it gives them the ability to run some business process, which can be really, really effective.

Joe: It is fantastic. One of the companies I started, which I did as a weekend project for a friend, was an angular app that sends a bunch of data to a Google Sheet for all these calculations. Since I built that in 2015, 99% of the business logic of that application has been the main founder on that project making changes in Google Sheets. He onboards a new customer. He sets up their logic in Google Sheets and it does everything that they need to do.

Jeremy: Which is amazing. Then there's so many other applications that you can do that with, that make it very, very simple for … I mean that's when you think of things like maybe Airtable or even integrating things. I know in the past I've integrated into services like Asana. Just tie into the API so that you already have those interfaces built because that's one of the hardest things to do sometimes as a developer, is to build a really good admin and if that's already built-in for you, you're off to the races.

Joe: I think people too often will disregard using a service like Zendesk, which is this amazing Swiss Army knife. They'll disregard it because they'll say, “Well, I can envision a world in which we're going to want to do this thing and it won't do that properly,” but the problem is you're a lot better off getting off the ground, getting things going, having a system that works, and then discovering what things really matter because I agree with you that probably you're going to run into cases where this third-party service like SAS tool with an API doesn't completely solve what you want. The bigger problem is what you think that is at the beginning is definitely not going to be what it actually doesn't do later. We live in a world where we don't have enough people who are constantly thinking.

More than 50% of the things that we think we need to build in the way we're going to build them, actually aren't going to work. We're going to build them. We're going to put them out there and they're not going to be usable. They're not going to do what we need to do. We're wrong about these things. It's so much better to get it out, experience it, even if you know that it's only 60, 70% ideal because that information that you'll get will enable you to make much better decisions. Often, what you'll find is when you weigh the priorities, you'll say, “Well, Zendesk is imperfect, but I'd much prefer to keep using Zendesk and use my development time on this other thing that I now realize is critical for our success.”

Jeremy: That's one of the things too that I love about serverless, just being able to string some things together quickly to get a prototype up and running because you do not know actually, never mind what's going to work, but what's going to be used. I can't tell...