It’s happening. Bit by bit, little by little, I’m morphing from an engineer into some kind of…manager. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still write code every day; but I find myself spending more and more time in analysis and discussion, in meetings and calls, making higher-level decisions, trying to organize teams, and worrying about strategy rather than tactics.

In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they’d found a profitable business model, the first thing VC’s would do is to start looking for an “operating exec” — usually an MBA who would act as the designated “adult” and take over the transition from Search to Build. The belief then was that most founders couldn’t acquire the skills rapidly enough to steer the company through this phase. The good news is that VC firms are beginning to appreciate the value of keeping the founder in place.

CAA is a new mechanism that will allow site owners to specify which Certificate Authorities are authorised to issue certificates for their domain name. It’s a simple DNS record so setup is a breeze and SSL Labs is now checking for it, so it’s time to do it!

Webfont optimization is a critical piece of the overall performance strategy. Each font is an additional resource, and some fonts may block rendering of the text, but just because the page is using webfonts doesn’t mean that it has to render slower. On the contrary, optimized fonts, combined with a judicious strategy for how they are loaded and applied on the page, can help reduce the total page size and improve page rendering times.

We weren’t the first people to encounter this problem, so we looked at how open source software projects dealt with these situations, and came to the conclusion that adopting the RFC process would help us make better decisions together.