Once you’ve hired a software engineer, it’s easy to feel like the recruiting process is over. However, the first few days and weeks of your new engineer’s experience are critical to their long term success and happiness at your startup. In this last part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about how we onboard software engineers at Blue Matador and the insights I’ve gained in this part of the CTO experience.

Last week, we spoke with a lot of folks at PagerDuty Summit, where we explored the power of error monitoring in a world that’s always on (or on-call). What a neat tweet. Throughout our conversations, one thing became clear: developers are seeking out increased efficiency — they want to minimize time to error detection and resolution. They want to know about issues, find the root cause, and fix them quickly so that they can move on to other things — like writing more code.

When incidents occur, the key to a fast resolution is seamless communication. Traditionally, folks would gather in a “war room” – a room with four walls that served as a gathering place for various teams to solve high-impact problems. As incident management modernizes, teams are more dispersed, and therefore need a higher-tech way to assemble. Opsgenie developed the Incident Command Center (ICC) with exactly this in mind.

At Codefresh we are all about collaboration and reusing existing standards instead of implementing proprietary solutions. A Codefresh pipeline is based on a series of Docker containers that act as individual steps. All Codefresh plugins are also just Docker images which means that extending a Codefresh pipeline is the same thing as writing a Dockerfile. Github has recently announced an integrated automation solution called Actions.

Real-time collaboration helps teams resolve issues quickly, which is crucial during outages when you don’t have a minute to lose. If your organization is using DingTalk, Alibaba’s platform for cross-team communication and collaboration, Datadog’s new integration lets you share and discuss annotated graphs on the fly and route alerts to your teams’ group chats so you can start troubleshooting issues without skipping a beat.

When working on the new Federated Reporting feature for CFEngine we had to solve the problem of collecting data from multiple CFEngine hubs (feeders) on a single hub (superhub). CFEngine hubs are using PostgreSQL to store data, so, more specifically, the problem was how to collect data from multiple PostgreSQL databases in one PostgreSQL database.

Over the last four years, the Icinga Director has grown from an optional configuration add-on to a mature Software product with lot‘s of features. Most Icinga installations are now driven by the Director, no matter whether they are small or huge, manually curated or fully automated.

Modern technology organizations are required to be adaptive in their approach to incident management. A single project will have multiple teams working as different branches on integrated systems. Even if all the members have unified communication channels when an interruption occurs in the service there’s bound to be chaos. The frontline response team will have to be on their toes to get to the root issues at the first signs of trouble.

If your company uses AWS, chances are you’ve considered developing a cloud optimization strategy. Since AWS resources can infinitely scale, many organizations find themselves in a conundrum where they’re not using these resources efficiently. However, a good cloud optimization strategy could potentially save an organization thousands, if not millions of dollars per year. Rather than be surprised by one more AWS bill, now is the time to think about your strategy.

If you’re anything like our customers, you’re running the majority of your business on the cloud. After headcount, it’s not uncommon that your cloud bill is one of your highest business expenses. So, it’s important to make sure you are getting maximum returns on that investment. Done right, cloud computing offers major financial and operational benefits for companies.