How amptalk Impressed a Silicon Valley Vet
Mike Rudling talks about his passion for creating great developer experiences, and compares his experience at amptalk with his decade in the Bay Area startup scene.
Some developers learn Japanese to find a job in Japan. Mike Rudling found a job in Japan to work on his Japanese.
I started learning Japanese when I met my [Japanese] wife about seven years ago, and then I was trying to learn in the U.S, and for about four years I was kind of progressing, but pretty slow. Eventually I was like, ‘I want to go to the next level.’ We talked about it: ‘Why don’t we give it a go?’ So, we decided to move.
Earlier in his career, Mike had relocated from the UK to the US via an internal transfer at his company. This time, he and his wife decided it would be simpler if he just quit his job and moved with her to Japan, where they could stay with his in-laws until he found a new role.
“I think it was about two months before I got the job with amptalk,” Mike said, “and then I didn’t start for about another six weeks. That’s one thing I noticed as soon as I got here—things move a little slower than in the Bay Area. . . . When they said to me, ‘Oh, it’ll be like six weeks before you start,’ I was really shocked. I was kind of expecting to start on Monday.”
But the day he started his new role as a full-stack engineer, in July 2023, Mike felt reassured. “Onboarding was smooth. [The CTO] had architected a really nice app, and he had put together nice onboarding material, so I was up and running in less than a day.”
Mike soon noted other differences between amptalk and the Silicon Valley companies he’d previously worked for. “I’ve been through the startup thing twice before. This is my third startup, and both of my other startups probably grew faster than this, especially the second one. The last one was crazy fast, so it was bumpy. . . . Actually this one’s relatively smooth by comparison so far.
“There are new people coming regularly, but they fit in nicely, and it’s been pretty unproblematic. I think we’ve got a good stack architected, I think we can scale.” Which is a good thing, Mike explained, because despite moving more slowly than his prior companies, amptalk is still expanding rapidly
We’ve grown from maybe 6 people to about 15 engineers or so at the moment, and we’re still growing. I think the plan is to keep doubling the size of the company every year.
“I mean, the one machine learning guy has turned into four machine learning people,” Mike told us. “But they’re kind of a little bit separate from us [software engineers],” he added.
“We also have a couple of [women] on our regular team that have joined as well, which is nice. In the Bay Area, I went from a team that was 15 [people], and then kind of everyone left.” When a second team was hired, Mike was disappointed by the results. “It was 50 men. I was like, ‘Where are all the women? This is awful.’”
So it’s really nice that as a small team, we have a few women on our team. It feels a little bit more balanced, which is nice because it’s such an unbalanced industry.
“We are an incredibly diverse team culturally as well,” he told us. “As you may know, our team’s from all over. We’re from France, Tunisia, China, America, England, like all over. I really, really like that diversity on the team.
“That’s kind of what I was used to from the Bay Area. The Bay Area is very diverse, and I’m used to very multicultural teams. . . . I think that was just luck, really, that I found myself in a team that’s very multicultural in Japan. It’s probably quite rare.”
The team has come together smoothly—partially, Mike thinks, due to amptalk’s open and relaxed work culture.
One thing that our team always does is go for lunch together, and have a sit-down lunch, which is really nice actually. That was really not what I was used to coming from the US, where people might just grab a sandwich and have it at their desk.
“Because we sat down for lunch every time I was in the office, I felt like [I was] becoming part of the team. It happened really quickly and very smoothly. I think that’s a nice cultural thing here that I really enjoy.”
Keita Suzuki, the CTO, also encourages openness. “Suzuki-san is really not closed-minded. Even though he’s built most of the original stuff, he’s not precious about it. He knows that there’s room for improvement. And if you’ve got ideas, he’ll listen for sure. He’s a good listener, and he’s very technically smart, so if you make the case, then he gets it straight away.”
Suzuki and Mike swiftly developed a good working relationship. “I think for him as well, because of the past experience I’ve brought to the company, I’ve been able to just say, ‘Look, I think we should do this.’ . . . Or [sometimes] I’ll just do it and he’ll be really pleased that I’ve done it. I probably won’t always have talked to him about it. I just do something and he’ll see it and he’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great. I don’t even have to think about it. Thank you!’”
For most of his first year at amptalk, Mike was focused on creating great developer experiences (DX) and making a strong foundation for the company to scale.
I’ve been spending a lot of my time trying to improve the DX for the team. My whole approach since coming to amptalk has really been about automating things, just to improve the efficiency of the team and make the team move faster. Generally, anything that improves other engineers’ lives, that makes their DX better, is something I’ve focused on.
For example, “As soon as I got to amptalk, it was obvious to me the release process was too slow and too manual. So the first thing I did was automate all of the release processes, so that basically everything happens at the press of a button.
“And now, we’ve gone from a release process that was once a week, on the weekend, on like a Saturday night, and involved a bunch of manual steps and took maybe 30 minutes or 40 minutes to actually complete the whole process, to releasing any time, multiple times a day. . . . It maybe takes 15 minutes to run everything, but you just push the button and you can forget about it. It’s done.”
These improvements helped the company win the Findy Team+ Organization Award for 2024.
Mike’s also been making it easier to leverage existing code when creating new solutions. “When I came, we had one monorepo, but now we’ve got probably a dozen main repos. I’ve been working on ESLint and making the rules so that everyone gets a consistent experience right off the bat, but then it’s also customizable if they want to customize things in their particular app. We’re also doing a lot of AWS CDK stuff. We’ve got reusable CDK components, and we also have a UI components library now. It’s really just about trying to make everything scale easily.”
Although Mike started at amptalk as a full-stack engineer, he’s recently moved into SRE. “It just seemed like a natural progression for me. I suppose part of it for me is DX.
“Actually, I first came to Suzuki-san and said, ‘I want to set up a platform team.’ And he was looking to bring on an SRE engineer. So we started the SRE team, but I still kind of see it as part of our remit to handle the platform stuff as well.”
So far this platform-and-SRE team consists of Mike and one part-timer, but they are now seeking to hire two more full-time engineers as well. “Because we’re small right now, we can do it, but I think we’ll have to split into two teams at some point.”
Given all these developments, it’s hardly surprising that amptalk is hiring at a fast clip. According to Mike, what sort of developers do well there?
It’s a smart team. It’s a bookish team. I think people are solution-oriented and very open to ideas. If someone sees a problem, they feel totally fine about raising their voice and saying, ‘I think this is a thing, and I think this is how we should solve it.’
“People who like to work in that way,” Mike concluded, “who have ideas and want to bring them to the table and work on them, I think they’ll fit in nicely.”
And speaking of bookish: “I’m always really blown away by how much this team reads, like, it’s incredible. They really do devour a lot of tech books. . . . We have a little library at the office. If anyone needs to expense a book, that’s fine.”
Employees also receive a monthly stipend for language lessons, although not quite enough to cover Mike’s Japanese classes, which he attends for six hours every week.
I started learning Japanese quite late. I was already past 40. Languages get harder as you get older. . . . I mean, there’s so much to remember in Japanese, right? Like loads of kanji. It’s a memory game, so I had to put in more hours.
Mike stressed, though, that these intellectual coworkers are also easy-going. “I think it’s quite a relaxed atmosphere. There isn’t really any tension between engineers. . . . Everyone seems to get on really well. It seems to be really easy to work out ideas with people. And I think anyone who wants to work on a diverse team, amptalk’s a good place for them.”