Real-World Serverless: fully-serverless insurance company with Joe Emison

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Yan Cui

I help clients go faster for less using serverless technologies.

In this two-part conversation on Real-World Serverless, I spoke with Joe Emison about his experience with serverless and his latest venture, Branch, a home and auto insurance company that is built fully-serverlessly by a small team.

Joe is easily one of the smartest people working with serverless technologies today and I’m very grateful that he shared some of his valuable time with us and gave us some great insights. We spoke about so many different things, and Joe brings a unique perspective to the table. He goes against the grain on many things (such as his decision to hire only junior web developers at Branch) and is never one to do things simply because that’s how we’ve always done things, or because that’s what everyone else does. Every decision, no matter how contrarian, is backed by sound reasoning and is made with the goal in mind. I think you’ll really enjoy what Joe has to say, and I hope it challenges some of your beliefs!

In episode 2, we discussed:

  • the value of serverless, and why Branch has gone all-in
  • the build vs buy decision
  • why the monorepo approach is a big win for small teams
  • how to structure your codebase in a monorepo
  • how to set up your CI/CD pipeline for a monorepo
  • the drawbacks of the monorepo approach

And in episode 3:

  • the problems with hiring senior developers these days
  • why Joe hires junior Front End developers and cross-trains them for full-stack development with serverless
  • the challenges of serverless adoption today – local debugging, etc.
  • AWS needs to improve some of the critical services like Cognito and close the gap with Auth0
  • Microsoft has a big gap in its service offering and should buy Netlify to plug the gap
  • why Microsoft will be the main competitor to AWS in the cloud market
  • Google’s cultural problems with how they view customers
Listen to the full episodes below, and you can access the transcripts here for episode 2 and here for episode 3.

Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:

  1. Production-Ready Serverless: Join 20+ AWS Heroes & Community Builders and 1000+ other students in levelling up your serverless game. This is your one-stop shop for quickly levelling up your serverless skills.
  2. I help clients launch product ideas, improve their development processes and upskill their teams. If you’d like to work together, then let’s get in touch.
  3. Join my community on Discord, ask questions, and join the discussion on all things AWS and Serverless.