Michael Lynch

I regret my website redesign

Mistakes I made working with my first design agency.

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

Stripe records user movements on its customers' websites

An investigation into how Stripe tracks your users and what you can do to prevent it

My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

My Second Year as a Solo Developer

I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business

Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later

Not many people remember this 2005 documentary featured early interviews with Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman.

My fifth year as a bootstrapped founder

How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

Within two emails, a merchant went from blatant dismissal to full payment, and I owe it to The Organized Professional Method.

How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You

Best practices for code review when you’re the author.

Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

Claude Code has gotten extremely good at finding security vulnerabilities, and this is only the beginning.

Lessons from my first exit

My takeaways from selling TinyPilot

My Third Year as a Solo Developer

My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes

My journey to create a YouTube of memories from my family’s old home videos.

Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server

How I chose parts, built, and configured my first custom home storage server.

My eighth year as a bootstrapped founder

In year 8, I discovered it takes longer than I think to write a book, found alignment with my business, and regained my love for life as an indie founder.

How I Stole a User's Siacoin

A lesson in Sia wallet seed safety

My First Impressions of Nix

Nix is a tool for configuring software environments according to source files. I’ve been hearing more and more about Nix on Hacker News and Twitter. The idea of it appeals to me, so I’ve been tinkering with it over the past few weeks. My history with infrastructure as code Ten years ago, I discovered Salt, a tool that…

My First Year as a Solo Developer

My first impressions of Gleam

What I’ve learned in my first few hours using Gleam for a small project.

Stripe responded to my concerns about user tracking

Stripe has made several significant, positive changes to its user tracking and privacy policies in the last week.

Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster?

For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained…

What I’ve Been Doing Since Quitting My Job

An update on my progress since going off to work on my own.

I Hired a Freelance Editor for My Blog (2017)

It’s surprisingly easy to hire a blog editor, and it provides tremendous value.

Using Zig to Unit Test a C Application

Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit…

Pursuing a Business I'll Love

Two of my businesses had record-setting months, and I’m finally building the app I’ve always wanted.

TinyPilot: Month 11

How do I increase TinyPilot’s profit margins?

How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human

Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every…

Why are coding agents so dumb?

Models are getting better and better, while the agents that drive them languish.