Chapter 1: What inspired Dylan Ratcliffe to start Overmind?
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Chapter 2: How did Dylan's background influence his career in tech?
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Chapter 3: What led to the creation of Overmind's dependency discovery tool?
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Chapter 4: How does Overmind prevent deployment outages?
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I'd thought that if we could discover every dependency in real time with no input from the user, because of course, if you expect the user to tell you where to look, then you're not going to find the things that are going to cause the actual problems, then this would solve the problem.
And so we built a real-time discovery engine that could do exactly that, find every dependency within your cloud environment and show it to you. It took about six or eight months. For the backend, I wrote it all in Go, not because I knew how to write Go. I didn't. I had to learn how to write Go.
Chapter 5: What were the initial challenges in building Overmind?
But because I knew that I would be able to hire infrastructure people who knew Go. My name is Dylan Ratcliffe, and I'm the founder and CEO of Overmind.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many guys to get right. Who built the teams that have their back.
Chapter 6: How has the product evolved since its inception?
A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again.
Chapter 7: What team dynamics does Dylan prioritize at Overmind?
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It's not just about technology. All this and more on Codestory. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Dylan Radcliffe is simulating incidents so you don't have to. And you can focus on deploying your infrastructure today. Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco for less than a year, but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games.
He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for university.
Chapter 8: What advice does Dylan have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. But outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes and has a super small one now. It's actually meant for kids. He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine. Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company and was pushing to get a win.
When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network to prevent deployment outages. This is the creation story of Overmind.
As a company, our mission is to remove the dread that people feel when they have to press the button to deploy to production. We do that by simulating your infrastructure changes against your real-time actual production infrastructure before you make those changes and therefore preventing any outages before they happen. I started building it because I'd seen this dread before.
I'd experienced the dread before because very often when you're deploying, especially infrastructure changes, which is what my background is and what we focus on, things can go wrong for reasons that are entirely not your fault.
And being afraid to press that deploy button, especially if you work in a big company with big complex infrastructure, which is built by people who've since left, being afraid to press that button is like a good survival instinct.
the thing that actually got me started in quitting my job was a particular incident with a printer so i was working at a financial services company in london which will remain nameless and we were deploying puppet we had a week to do it we'd done everything we needed to do we wanted to get a big win in before the end of the week and so we had this change in the pipeline ready to go
which was instead of having one password for all of their systems which i realize is terrible and that's why we're getting rid of it people would instead log in with their username and password and so this is like a linux backend server fleet so you use triple sd to set all this up and so this change would move from there being one password which was like written down in sticky notes around the office to actually people's usernames and passwords so when they
quit the company we could delete them and all kinds of stuff and we had done all the testing we tested it in the dev environment we got all the approvals it was absolutely ready to go and we were ready at 3pm on Friday to press the button and just get a big win in before the end of the engagement the 3pm on Friday thing should be foreshadowing to anyone who's ever worked with infrastructure it's a bad idea to press that button at 3pm on a Friday especially when you're supposed to turn into a pumpkin at 5pm because
The engagement is over and they're no longer paying you. But we did it anyway because we were legitimately confident. And the phone rang. Well, it didn't ring initially. Initially, everything was fine. And then the phone rang and somebody said, hey, our entire department is at a standstill because we can't save PDFs and we need to save PDFs to do our job.
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