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Why I’m leaving 18F
On Election Night 2016, a few hours before the results were fully in, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I’m staying at 18F”. I felt it was…
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The Arrival of AI
What is artificial intelligence? Is it really any different than technology? In my estimation machine learning is truly something new, and the effects on society will be significant.
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I'm Joining Report URI
What if I told you... that you can get visitors to your site to automatically check for a bunch of security issues. And then, when any are found, those visitors will let you know about it automatically. And the best bit is that you can set this up in a
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JavaScript is Eating the World
NodeJS is quickly becoming one of the most commonly used language in building web applications and is beginning to find its way into the Enterprise.
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China is catching up to the USA, while Japan is being left behind
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea... that previously contributed few research articles... have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has…
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Clever ideas that failed (2010)
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
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This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes
Last week I linked to this video by Skill Up , which talks about how the concept of loot boxes developed inside of EA and how we got to where we are today. This time let’s talk about it in detail.
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Four DB2 Code Bases?
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a single code base…
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Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
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What People Think You Can’t Say in Silicon Valley
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
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Indie games don't make money
At the time of writing, a quick check of stats on steamspy for player unknown:battlegrounds reveals this chart:
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The Uber Conflation
It’s easy to conflate criticism of Uber’s regulatory approach with accusations about the company’s culture. That is CEO Travis Kalanick’s responsibility; it’s also a f…
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Faster, Better, Cheaper – The Art of Making Software
Nobody wants to deliver late, over-budget software. I don’t know a single software developer who wakes up in the morning and thinks “I’d like to do a rubbish job today. How can I cost my employer more money?” And yet, so many software projects don’t go well. And with every new project, there seems to be more and more…
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An Early Engineer's Guide to Early Stock Option Exercise
Advice on the most important decision you’ll make as an early employee.
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‘Honeypot’ pages to try to convert people searching for cracked software
Software piracy is a fact of life for vendors of desktop software. Take a look at Google’s helpful suggestions if you search on the name of one of my products: Trying to make your software cr…
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The China ICO Ban
Regulators in China imposed a blanket ban on ICOs over the long weekend. A number of people have reached out to me via email and Twitter asking me what I think about this. I think regulation of ICOs is inevitable and a good thing if done right (ie lightly). The SEC’s comments on ICOs back […]
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The Digital Advertising Duopoly
This chart from eMarketer really brings it home. We have a digital advertising duopoly. The difference between second and third place is massive. I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. I want to see the technology industry adopt new approaches to monetization, ideally not…
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Unkown Unknowns: Why you should release early
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. - Mark Twain
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Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover
There are striking similarities between Microsoft today and IBM in the Lou Gerstner era, but today’s IBM should be a warning to Redmond.
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My Heroku values (2015)
Some of my favorite practices and ideas from almost four years at Heroku.
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