davidpoll.com
Building systems, writing about engineering, and learning in public.
Posts
-
Twelve Years Later
My last post here was about building a data binding framework for Android. That was March 2013. Android was on KitKat, React hadn’t been open-sourced yet, and I was still convinced that mobile apps needed XAML-style data binding to succeed.
Narrator: They didn’t.
What Happened?
Life, mostly. Looking at my old posts, I can trace the arc: I was evangelizing Parse, building pitch pipe apps for barbershop singers, and trying to make Android development feel more like Silverlight.
Then Facebook acquired Parse. I stuck around for the ride, helped with identity products, and eventually tried my hand at being a startup founder. I spent a year building Hoomi, an identity platform that gave users control of their digital identities. It didn’t work out—turns out competing with “Login with Google/Facebook” is tough when you’re a team of two, and when people still trusted Facebook with their privacy. Simpler times.
After that humbling education, I joined Firebase—Google had just acquired them, and it felt like fate. Here was the spiritual successor to Parse, the chance to pick up the backend-as-a-service mission where we’d left off. “We’ll help them democratize app development,” I thought. “How hard could it be to change how developers build software?”
Turns out the answer is: hard in the best possible way.
Oh, and somewhere in there I got married (2016) and had three amazing kids—now 7, 4.5, and 3 months old. Talk about transformative experiences. Nothing teaches you about scaling systems, managing resources, and graceful degradation quite like having three children. Or about the importance of clear documentation, for that matter. Try explaining why the sky is blue to a 4-year-old while debugging production issues and feeding a baby.
Last month, I hit my 10-year anniversary at Google.
The Missing Decade
Since my last post about Android data binding, I’ve had a front-row seat to some fascinating evolutions:
Firebase transformed from scrappy startup to the default platform for millions of developers. I led the SDK team through major developer experience overhauls, open-sourced everything, and somehow made real-time sync feel boring (in the good way). I also became an engineering manager here—turns out leading humans is harder than debugging race conditions. Though growing up with a therapist for a mother and sister meant I’d been training for this my whole life. Who knew that talking about feelings and relationships at every family dinner would become a professional superpower? Becoming a parent only reinforced this: the skills that make you good at helping a senior engineer navigate career anxiety are surprisingly similar to helping a 7-year-old process why their Magna-Tiles tower got destroyed by their sibling.
Over 5.5 years, I ran the API council that reviewed 800+ proposals across every language, ecosystem, database schema, CLI command, and REST API that Firebase shipped. If you’ve used Firebase and the APIs made sense, you’re welcome. If they didn’t, well, you should’ve seen the first drafts.
What I learned: You can think strategically for the organization—scale, revenue, market position—while still keeping developer empathy at the center of every decision. The best platforms win because they never forget who they’re building for.
Voice platforms promised to be the next frontier. I spent a year trying to help Google Assistant become a developer platform. We learned a lot about why some platforms take off and others… don’t. Spoiler: great technology isn’t enough—you need to meet developers where they are, not where you wish they were.
Android development completely transformed. Remember when I was trying to hack data binding onto Android? Now it’s built in. Along the way, I helped reshape how Google Play Services delivers developer features to billions of devices and millions of developers. The lesson? Sometimes the platform won’t solve your distribution problem—so you get creative and build a better delivery truck. Play Services became Android’s vital tool for reaching developers despite OS fragmentation.
Cloud platforms became the default. I now lead the team building client libraries for Google Cloud—helping developers navigate 100+ services without losing their minds. Here we’re learning to scale great developer experience across a massive portfolio, rather than crafting bespoke, artisanal APIs. It’s industrializing developer empathy.
The AI Inflection Point
But the biggest change? AI went from research papers to pair programmer.
Not just the obvious stuff—yes, Claude, GPT, and Gemini can fix my Python indentation. The profound shift is how AI rewires the entire stack of software development. What happens when every developer has a brilliant pair programmer? When code generation is instant but code understanding still takes years to develop? When the scarcest resource isn’t coding ability but taste and judgment?
Firebase and Parse made things that required a backend team suddenly achievable by a solo developer. AI is doing the same thing, just at a dramatically larger scale—making capabilities that used to require entire engineering organizations suddenly accessible to anyone with an idea. We’re not just removing friction; we’re collapsing the cost and complexity of building software by orders of magnitude.
As an engineering leader, these aren’t hypothetical questions anymore. They’re the decisions that shape how we build teams and products today. Which brings me to why I’m writing again.
Why Break the Silence Now?
Three things pulled me back:
1. AI is rewriting the rules. We’re living through the biggest shift in software development since Stack Overflow launched. I’m trying to figure it out too, and writing helps me think.
2. Platform lessons are evergreen. Whether it’s Silverlight at Microsoft, Parse at Facebook, Firebase at Google, or my own failed startup, the patterns repeat. After nearly two decades of building platforms at scale (and watching one fail up close), the lessons are worth sharing.
3. The barbershop principle still applies. In my 2013 post, I wrote about how barbershop harmony helped my tech career. Twelve years later, that’s even more true. The best engineering insights often come from outside engineering. The best leaders have lives beyond their laptops.
What’s Next
I’ll be writing about what I’ve learned at the intersection of developer tools, engineering leadership, and the AI transformation:
- How to build engineering orgs where people grow, surprise themselves, and create artful solutions that developers love
- Why some developer tools win hearts while others just win benchmarks
- What AI actually changes about software development (and what it doesn’t)
- Leadership lessons from the trenches of platform wars (and startup graveyards)
No posting schedule promises. But I have hard-won insights worth sharing.
The tools have changed—that Bindroid framework I was so proud of is hilariously obsolete—but the core challenge remains: How do we democratize development and give developers superpowers?
Nearly 20 years of building platforms. Ten years at Google.
Time to start sharing what I’ve learned. I’d love for you to join the conversation.
Find me on LinkedIn and X for more frequent thoughts, or dust off your RSS reader and subscribe. Yes, RSS still works. Yes, I’m keeping it.
-
Bindroid - A Binding Framework for Android
I'll admit it -- I was spoiled by my days on the Silverlight team, playing with XAML, .NET, and databinding. When I started building Android versions of my apps, I went in with the expectation of a similarly modern, powerful UI framework, but quickly found myself frustrated by the complexity of creating UI that tracks values as they change in my application.
-
How Barbershop Harmony Has Helped My Career in Tech
I'm a software engineer. I'm also completely addicted to an incredible hobby: barbershop. I've been reflecting lately on the impact of this thing I've grown to be so passionate about over a very short amount of time on the development of my career, and I've realized it's been pivotal for me. It's kept me grounded, built my network, given me a reason to build cool things, helped me find the confidence and courage to do things I never thought I'd do, and been a huge amount of fun in the process. I wanted to share a bit about why I'm so excited about it, and why it (or any other hobby) might hold some similar value for other aspiring engineers. -
Parse now supports .NET and JavaScript Windows 8 Development
Hi all! I know it's been a while since I last blogged, but I've been hard at work. Since January, I've been excitedly working at a startup called Parse, working hard to make building rich, connected mobile apps easy. Parse provides a ready-made backend for your mobile app, and it allows you to go from zero to app in no time. I use it for my own apps (across all platforms), and we've got lots of folks building amazing things on our platform. I'm extremely proud of the work we do, and I think everyone that is doing mobile app development should give it a close look and see if it meets their needs.
-
Pitch Perfect for iOS now available
Wow, it's been a very long time since I've posted, but so much has happened in the last year. I joined an incredible startup called Parse, and am working on things I've never been more excited about.
subscribe via RSS