Nick The Dev

🇬🇧
🚀 (Building, 2026)
🤖 (Acquired, 2026)
🎥 (Acquired, 2026)

#buildinpublic

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

My sleep paralysis demon looks different in the daytime

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Most engineering teams know they should improve. Fewer know where to start.

We built Poggle on the ELEVATE Framework because it's the clearest model we've found for understanding what makes engineering teams effective.

ELEVATE defines seven pillars of high-performing engineering. Each one is measurable, actionable, and connected to real delivery outcomes:

Velocity and Throughput. How quickly work moves through the system.

Code Quality. The health of the codebase reflected in review practices, PR discipline, and meaningful changes versus churn.

Resilience. How well the team handles failures and builds systems that degrade gracefully.

Collaboration and Flow. How effectively the team works together. Review responsiveness, knowledge sharing, coordination.

Focus on Delivering Value. Whether engineering effort aligns with business outcomes.

Onboarding and Enablement. How quickly new hires become productive contributors.

Progression by Craft. Whether engineers are growing in skill and taking on increasing technical challenge.

We chose ELEVATE over other frameworks for three reasons.

It's measurable from observable signals. No surveys. No manual reporting. Most pillars can be assessed from data already in your engineering tools.

It covers the full picture. A team can have excellent velocity but terrible code quality. ELEVATE forces you to look at all dimensions, not just optimize one metric at the expense of everything else.

It's actionable. Each pillar maps to specific practices teams can adopt and measure. It's not an abstract maturity model. It's a concrete system where improvement corresponds to observable behaviour changes.

Poggle automates the measurement. Continuous scoring across all seven pillars. Goal-setting against specific pillars. Trend visibility over time. Team and individual insights surfaced at the right level.

Teams using this approach consistently see cycle time drop 20-40% within eight weeks, review culture improve, quality regressions decrease, and onboarding accelerate.

The most significant result is sustained improvement. Because ELEVATE measures systemic practices rather than heroic effort, improvements compound over time.

Wrote about why we built Poggle on ELEVATE and how it works in practice: https://t.co/MY08xwqcA7

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Slack started as an internal chat tool for a failing game company.

They weren't trying to build a communication platform. They needed a way for their remote team to work together while building a game that ultimately never shipped.

The game died. The chat tool didn't.

They realized they'd accidentally built something more valuable than what they set out to create. A way for teams to communicate that didn't feel like email or enterprise software.

No video calls at launch. No huddles. No workflows. Just channels, direct messages, and search that actually worked.

They added integrations because their own team needed them. They added notifications because missing messages was painful. Every feature came from real use, not a product roadmap.

Most founders build what they think the market needs. The best products come from building what you actually need, then realizing other people have the same problem.

If you're building something and nobody on your team uses it daily, you're guessing.

Use your own product. Feel the pain. Fix what's broken for you.

That's how you know what to build next.

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Only 24.5% of developers are happy at work.

That number is from Stack Overflow's 2025 survey. Over 26,000 respondents. Nearly half are just complacent. 43.6% are considering leaving.

Most engineering leaders treat this like an HR problem. Better perks. More flexibility. Team events.

But the real issue is the work itself.

Developers don't leave because the office isn't nice enough. They leave because the system is broken.

Code reviews taking days. Constantly context switching between half-finished work. Onboarding that takes months. Bugs shipping to production because there's no time to do it properly. Promotions based on tenure instead of growth.

All of that shows up as unhappiness. But it's not a morale problem. It's a delivery system problem.

The teams with high engineering satisfaction aren't the ones with the best benefits. They're the ones with the best operating models.

Fast onboarding. Clear ownership. Low rework. Sustainable pace. Engineers who can see their own progress and feel like they're improving.

If nearly half your team is thinking about leaving, ping pong tables won't fix it.

You need to fix how the work actually gets done.

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@marclou

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Shipping a new OG image for https://t.co/saDCv2A61J - > What do you guys think?

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

After 5 days of the https://t.co/saDCv2A61J launch, we just completed our first demo and onboarded our first enterprise customer onto our pilot 🎉

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@marclou The irony here is that other marketplaces like acquire etc will have faced this issue. But employees are trained to follow systems not seek solutions to problems, it probably didn’t even occur to them to suggest/request this change.

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@marclou It’s such a dark pattern, needs to be made illegal.. along with cancellation fees > the annual plan

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Everyone is building an AI product, but they're also paying the AI tax 💰

I've spent the last few months learning how to optimise LLM token costs on my projects, and have saved an average of 80% 📈

I wrote a blog about it in more detail:

https://t.co/kOj5iKC071

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

Been working on adding COOL animations to the https://t.co/saDCv2A61J individual goals section today:

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@brockpierson Here's to 100k 🙌

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@marclou @trust_mrr I actually had a super good experience selling HypeClip on TrustMRR. Easily one of the smoothest exits I've done 🥳

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

After a much-needed break, it feels good to be back, refreshed, revitalised and working on https://t.co/saDCv2A61J 🛠️

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

My co-worker keeps judging me… might report to HR

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

I've been working on an achievement system today, ahead of the https://t.co/saDCv2A61J launch 🚀

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

I started work last week on my most ambitious project of 2026 😅

It's called BlinkBuild, an AI saas that builds easy-to-use e-commerce websites for small businesses.

I know many small business owners in the UK (hairdressers, bakers, etc.). More often than not, they'll pay £3k for a WordPress website with a theme, only to find they can't edit anything further.

I once saw an agency quote of £500 for changing the banner image on a WordPress site 😐

The idea is simple: there will be hundreds of templates to choose from, or the owner can use the chat functionality to create a bespoke website from scratch.

They can use natural language and select functionality to edit fields, 0 to complete the website and deployment in < 10 mins ⚡️

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

What’s everyone’s experience with dodo payments been like?

[Nick The Dev @nickdevsbadly]

@chrissyinspace I will do, I’m sure I’ll generate a list before long 😆