haney

> * Keeping track of which of our many builds are failing/passing

Might I suggest circleci? We use it to build every branch for every developer's fork. It's pretty easy.

Great post David, looking forward to hearing you speak at the Thiel Summit.

If you haven't checked in lately the scene is Chatt is growing daily http://noogastartups.com/

I went to UT and started and did research at ORNL. I left in 2011 to start a startup in Chattanooga (Colocated with Banyan). Tenneessee (specifically Chattanooga) is a great place to start a company. There's good funding, low cost of living and a pretty nice talent pool.

I lived for months on food from a croc pot, I ate better, lost weight and saved buckets of cash not eating out. Chili is a god sent for poor cofounders.

We have an IRC bot that our sysadmin scripted. We pick the project we want deployed and issue a single command, it's amazing for low friction deployments.

I've been using this for a few months, it is FANTASTIC, great great job. This made my life better.

An understanding of how to automate common tasks so that they can be reproducible and a deep enough understanding of your stack to be able to measure and test you assumptions. Also, like mryan said an understanding of the business needs that lead to the existence of the infrastructure in the first place.