(2024-10-23) Twisting The Rules Of Building Software Bending Spoonsthe Team Behind Evernote

Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote). 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

In today’s conversation, we discuss:

• The controversial acquisitions approach of Bending Spoons
• How Bending Spoons spent more than $1 billion in buying tech companies
• How the Evernote acquisition happened
• How Bending Spoons operates and how it organizes product and platform teams

Takeaways

1. Even inside one company, you choose engineering processes based on the maturity of the product

more mature products have a lot more automated tests

more mature products will have more stages of release and experimentation

2. The concept of radical simplicity

When adding complexity, the person or team approaching should bring proof why this complexity is beneficial

3. You don’t need to copy popular approaches to succeed as a product or engineering team

Their most popular language is Python

They do not have career ladders

If a small company in Italy with five devs could do this and keep figuring out what works for them as they grow: what is stopping you and your team from doing so?