Today we're welcoming Dustin Schau to Adapt as our VP of Product & Engineering, where he leads the teams shipping the AI computer for teams.
Dustin joins us from Postman, where he led the API client team and product that is used by millions of developers every day. Before that he was Senior Director of Engineering at Netlify, by way of a Gatsby acquisition where he joined as employee #11 on the engineering team and eventually became VP of Product & Engineering and an honorary co-founder title.
In his first weeks at Adapt he's been sincerely enjoying meeting the team, growing the team, talking to customers, and yes, building a few improvements here and there directly.
About Dustin, in his words
How did you get into building?
I think I've always been a builder, by nature. My foray into engineering was actually via design though, where in my teenage years I would uhm, legally purchase Adobe Creative Suite, to build iOS icons and websites via design tools, and then when I discovered that I could build them immediately with fast feedback loops with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript I was hooked. In general, I like building things and I've always loved frontend development in particular primarily due to the quick feedback loops of seeing a problem, addressing a problem, and seeing your hard work pay off when users appreciate what you built.
Why Adapt, why now?
The short version: I deeply trust the founding team (Jim, Sean, John Andrew), I think Ash (CMO) is the best marketing leader I've ever worked with (the Gatsby mafia!), and the product is genuinely AI-native rather than bolted on, and almost nobody is building this layer for entire teams instead of just engineers. Further still, the integrations angle felt so natural to me from Gatsby where that was a key part of our strategy so it's fun to build out integrations not just for headless CMSs but for anything with an API. The longer version is on my blog. Like every good career move I've made, it's a little scary and a lot exciting.
📱 What's on your home screen?
You'll note some greyed out apps and an upcoming one that maybe you'll recognize... I'm a copious user of a nice screen-time blocking app called "ScreenZen" that I use to ensure my screen time is roughly <2 hours or less daily!
What's one part of your job you'll be relieved to never do again?
Write code manually by hand. Just kidding -- I still do believe in this :) More seriously, in my first few weeks I've really loved having Adapt in every Slack channel and connected to all tools so that I don't have to form a mental model of where everything is, and how to access it, and I've found myself using tools that we rely on not via the UI but kind of inline with a data store that we can leverage and interact with with natural language and a Slack-based chat prompt. I already live in Slack, so the extension to my productivity in a place I already spend a lot of time in is truly a game changer. So it's not so much one task or part of my job, it's that the fundamental way in which I interact with software accelerates with Adapt every day.
A piece of software, tool, or workflow you think is criminally underrated, and what does loving it say about you?
Oh so many. I'll need to break this into various facets.
Known but still underrated: Google Docs. It's so great for collaboration and back-and-forth editing workflows. Every other tool that claims to be a collaborative surface pales in comparison to how good Google Docs is at seamless editing, actually useful in-place and joint editing, and tight feedback workflows via e-mail and commenting that just work deriving better documents and shared understandings.
Truly underrated: Fantastical. The team building Fantastical is just so top-notch and I've always loved the natural language calendar creation, but more generally the native Mac and iOS apps are just stellar.
Under-appreciated: rsync. I really value and appreciate tools that aren't flashy but are reliable, stable, and just work. Rsync has driven so many useful workflows for me in my life whether it's migrating terrabytes of data from hard drive X to Y or now persisting photos from my camera to Cloudflare R2 so I have multiple backups, it just works always.
Welcome, Dustin. We're glad you're here!
