Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)Its controversial acquisitions approach, why Bending Spoons aims to have no oncall, the Evernote migration in order to retire the monolith, and more.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Brought to you by: • The Enterprise Ready Conference on October 30th — For B2B leaders building enterprise SaaS. — You may not be familiar with Bending Spoons, but I guarantee you’ve encountered some of their well-known products, like Evernote and Meetup. In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, we sit down with three key figures from the Italy-based startup: cofounder and CEO Luca Ferrari, CTO Francesco Mancone, and Evernote product lead Federico Simionato. Bending Spoons has been profitable from day one, and there's plenty we can learn from their unique culture, organizational structure, engineering processes, and hiring practices. In today’s conversation, we discuss:
 Takeaways1. Even inside one company, you choose engineering processes based on the maturity of the product. The CTO of Bending Spoons found it completely normal that each team decides on their approach to testing: e.g. more mature products have a lot more automated tests like unit, integration, UI tests in-place. New products or less mature ones will still have less. Same goes for releasing and experiemantion – e.g. more mature products will have more stages of releases and have experimentation, but products that are still just being built will not necessarily invest in this. 2. The concept of radical simplicity: this could be applicable far beyond Bending Spoons. 3. You don’t need to copy popular approaches in order to become successful as a product or engineering team. Bending spoons seems to have come up with how it makes sense for them to operate, and did not “copy” common approaches from other companies. A few examples:
Timestamps(2:09) Welcome, Luca, Francesco, and Federico from Bending Spoons (03:15) An overview of the well-known apps and products owned by Bending Spoons (06:38) The elephant in the room: how Bending Spoons really acquires companies (09:46) Layoffs: Bending Spoons’ philosophy on this (14:10) Controversial principles (17:16) Revenue, team size, and products (19:35) How Bending Spoons runs AI products and allocates GPUs (23:05) History of the company (27:04) The Evernote acquisition (29:50) Modernizing Evernote’s infrastructure (32:44) “Radical simplicity” and why they try for zero on calls (36:13) More on changes made to the Evernote systems (41:13) How Bending Spoons prioritizes and ships fast (49:40) What’s new and what’s coming for Bending Spoons (51:08) Organizational structure at the company (54:07) Engineering practices (57:03) Testing approaches (58:53) Platform teams (1:01:52) Bending Spoons tech stack and popular frameworks (1:05:55) Why Bending Spoons hires new grads and less experienced engineers (1:08:09) The structure of careers and titles at Bending Spoons (1:09:50) Traits they look for when hiring (1:12:50) Why there aren’t many companies doing what Bending Spoons does ReferencesThe Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: Where to find Luca Ferrari: • X: https://x.com/luke10ferrari • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-ferrari-12418318 Where to find Francesco Mancone: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-mancone Where to find Federico Simionato: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicosimionato Mentions during the episode: • Evernote: https://evernote.com/ • Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/ • Bending Spoons: https://bendingspoons.com/ • Bending Spoons Acquires Mosaic Group Digital Assets From IAC: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240110239723/en/Bending-Spoons-Acquires-Mosaic-Group-Digital-Assets-From-IAC • StreamYard: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240110239723/en/Bending-Spoons-Acquires-Mosaic-Group-Digital-Assets-From-IAC • Issuu: https://issuu.com/ • WeTransfer: https://wetransfer.com/ • Remini: https://remini.ai/ • Netflix’s Famous 'Keeper Test': https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-new-culture-memo-keeper-test-changes-2024-6 • Bending Spoons Values: https://bendingspoons.com/values • Splice: https://splice.com/ • GoPro: https://gopro.com/ • Thirty more exciting improvements in Evernote: https://evernote.com/blog/30-improvements-april-june-2024 • Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/ • Jobs at Bending Spoons: https://jobs.bendingspoons.com/ • Evernote on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@evernote Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. You’re on the free list for The Pragmatic Engineer. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Many readers expense this newsletter within their company’s training/learning/development budget. This post is public, so feel free to share and forward it. If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my book, The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Here is what Tanya Reilly, senior principal engineer and author of The Staff Engineer's Path said about it:
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Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)
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