Ryan Peterman

Do they go back down the slider to where you start micromanaging?

You mentioned, because you were the most senior engineer at Dropbox at some point, that you had to mentor other very senior engineers.

And when I think about mentoring a junior engineer, it's relatively straightforward patterns.

But when I think about, let's say I need to mentor a senior staff engineer, maybe even a principal engineer,

On the topic of career advice, the industry's changed a lot in the last five years because of all these agentic tools.

And I wanted to know if you thought, is there any career advice that majorly changed in the last five years?

Something that you used to say five years ago, you don't say anymore or vice versa.

if I was just devil's advocate or just thinking from the junior engineer perspective, I might think, well, the proof that Claude can do this work today means that I don't need to know it today or tomorrow or in the future.

So why, why even build that skill in the first place?

Like, and also these agentic tools, they have positive trajectories too.

I wanted to talk about what you're working on now, or Convex, and why did you quit Dropbox to build Convex?

That was one thing I wanted to ask because immediately when I think, oh, I just need a backend or something like that, just go to AWS or just host something like that.

So this is a layer of abstraction kind of on top of those types of primitives.

Yes.

That makes it easier for an application developer.

When you talk about the abstraction, there's obviously a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes in Convex and the technical side.

And what is it that Convex is building behind the scenes that you're most excited about and why?

You mentioned fork, and in operating systems, I'm familiar, you just take the existing process and kind of split it.

What's the idea of fork in a distributed system?

When you reflect on your career, and it sounds like you've done a lot of gnarly technical work across your PhD, Dropbox seemed like pretty intense systems work, and Convex is also doing a lot of cool stuff.