/Chris Bell

The Developer's Guide To Notification System Tooling In 2025 tl;dr: “If you opened this blog post, you’re probably about to wade into the complicated ecosystem of notification and customer engagement tooling. It can feel like a daunting task. Not to fear, in this post we’re here to walk you through the basics of notification systems and the ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and vendors that surround them.”

featured in #572


The Developer's Guide To Notification System Tooling In 2025 tl;dr: “If you opened this blog post, you’re probably about to wade into the complicated ecosystem of notification and customer engagement tooling. It can feel like a daunting task. Not to fear, in this post we’re here to walk you through the basics of notification systems and the ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and vendors that surround them.”

featured in #567


The Developer's Guide To Notification System Tooling tl;dr: Chris covers: (1) The key components of a notification system and their relevant use cases. (2) An overview of the tools, frameworks, and services available when building a notification system. (3) How to put these together to make the right choice for your use case and product.

featured in #517


The Five Principles Of Modern Developer Tools tl;dr: Engineering teams are increasingly outsourcing non-core, yet critical parts of their stack to third-party vendors. This post delves into the challenges and emerging solutions of using third-party services in your stack. It discusses five key principles of modern developer tools: code-based resource management, source control management, rich type definitions, CI/CD integration and managing tools as part of your deployment lifecycle.

featured in #501


The Five Principles Of Modern Developer Tools tl;dr: Engineering teams are increasingly outsourcing non-core, yet critical parts of their stack to third-party vendors. This post delves into the challenges and emerging solutions of using third-party services in your stack. It discusses five key principles of modern developer tools: code-based resource management, source control management, rich type definitions, CI/CD integration and managing tools as part of your deployment lifecycle.

featured in #466


The Five Principles Of Modern Developer Tools tl;dr: "Here are the principles of the modern developer tool that emerged from our own work solving customer challenges, and that we're seeing in other developer tools we use." The authors discuss the following: (1) Work with resources in code. (2) Source control management. (3) Rich type definitions. (4) Run tests locally and in your CI workflow. (5) Manage as part of your deployment lifecycle.

featured in #462


How We Work: Moving Fast To Ship Customer Value tl;dr: Chris discusses his company's principles for shipping code: (1) Lean into trunk-based development. (2) Ship high quality so each feature "needs to feel cohesive, work near flawlessly, and be the best iteration of itself for it to be valuable." (3) Make it easy for everyone on the team to ship. (4) Keep a weekly changelog to include all of the features shipped over the past week. (5) Optimize for developer autonomy.

featured in #340


How We Onboard Engineers At A Devtools Startup tl;dr: "To build a truly great developer tool you need to go beyond the default empathy that new engineers have for developers at large. You need to use the tool itself, exactly as a customer would." Chris shares Knock's onboarding principles, process, onboarding project and more. 

featured in #337


5 Ways To Move Fast, Ship Customer Value, And Promote Developer Autonomy tl;dr: Knock’s co-founder and CTO Chris Bell outlines the five principles they’ve used at Knock to ship value to customers every week and to create a culture of autonomy and ownership.

featured in #300


How We Work: Moving Fast To Ship Customer Value tl;dr: Chris discusses his company's principles for shipping code: (1) Lean into trunk-based development. (2) Ship high quality so each feature "needs to feel cohesive, work near flawlessly, and be the best iteration of itself for it to be valuable." (3) Make it easy for everyone on the team to ship. (4) Keep a weekly changelog to include all of the features shipped over the past week. (5) Optimize for developer autonomy.

featured in #267