I'm not sure SOC-2 is even valuable for most smaller apps. As it's compliance is more aligned for financial apps.

It might be more valuable for you to have a security audit instead of SOC-2.

I just started with Ableton recently working on remixing tracks I like. Actually working on a remix of Ella Langley's Be Her just because I thought it was a cool genre bending remix.

After you do some remixes creating your own from scratch will be easier.

Mimicing songs and artists you like is a good recommendation, you can also cut up and remix parts of songs you like.

Copying isn't your biggest worry.

My teams have used a lot of slack msgs and slack huddles, lots of zoom meetings so everyone feels pretty connected.

It's great if you can meet up together at least once a year, work out of an office together and go out, grab drinks, eat meals together for team building.

You'll need a routine, exercise, taking breaks, leverage flexible hours, take a trip and work remote from somewhere cool and interesting.

Take breaks to cook a meal, laundry, play guitar for 10 minutes, get outside for a quick walk, enjoy your pets, say hi to your family, have lunch with a friend, you won't go stir crazy.

Being remote is one of my favorite things about my career, I love it.

If anything engineers are doing more with AI and aren't limited to just APIs.

They are building more of the UI/UX, Design, Front/Back + API instead of less and meeting/building product's vision.

Supported by Devops.

Every layer of the process will be enhanced by AI so everyone is doing more that our previous process.

I wouldn't limit any layer, enable everyone and every team to do more and be more productive.

Engineering should be doing the engineering.

Product should be doing product.

DevOps should be providing infra.

If end users want to use a report generator or setup a notification rule that's one thing but duct taping features together never is sustainable.

I've been doing this at every company I work at. Ask for 10% or 20% time to spend building prototypes to leverage technology to solve problems that provide a huge value to your org.

Compile a list of problems and look for the lowest lift and highest value to org.

Build one and if it's a success you'll get full buy in.

You can pick the stack you want to work with and integrate with ServiceNow as needed. Not familiar with service now but there are always things you can do with multiple stacks/services that provide value to the org.

Maybe this will scratch your itch and possibly open up a new position/group you could develop inside and run.

Once you have some wins and build trust you can collaborate more on future projects.

The director has a responsibility to implement his vision that's why they hired him. That will be make or break for his success. Your team is responsible for implementing his vision with some collaboration along the way of course but directors have the autonomy to guide their ship.

You'll need to duplicate existing code and make it your own or risk adding one piece of new functionality and breaking things that were using that code in 20 unexpected places.

Build new isolated code with best practices.

You'll slowly become familiar with it and get a feel for the best way to make updates and changes safely.

SSO is a solved problem in most frameworks and should be easy to implement quickly.

Rails or Laravel it's quick to implement SSO for various flavors.

With Laravel I can go from 0 to new web app in production in 15 Minutes

I can register a new domain, point name servers to CloudFlare.

Setup my local env with Herd from scratch, build a server with Forge, point A record to server IP. Setup SSL cert with Forge/Let's Encrypt.

Start a new laravel project, use jetstream to setup an app with users, auth, 2FA and a dashboard. Create a new GitHub Repo, deploy my code to the new server through Forge.

Create a new user through the UI, Login with 2FA, view Dashboard.

Give me 30 minutes and I can setup a Load Balancer, multiple app and worker servers.