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Goodbye, CSS-Tricks
I woke up yesterday to the news that DigitalOcean has cut a bunch of jobs from the payroll. It sounds like a pretty big wave, and yes, my job was lopped off
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U.S. stock market returns – a history from the 1870s to 2022
Facts and figures on U.S. stock market returns from 1871 to 2024. Annual returns, likelihood of losing money, best / worst months, and more.
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OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain
The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…
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Twilio’s toll fraud problem
On New Years’ Day, I woke up to 40 emails from Twilio, each with the subject line of, “Your Twilio account has been recharged.” In total…
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The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
Some might remember a book I released in 2016, “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”. A lot has changed in the world since then, and Shenzhen is no exception.
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Amazon's Silent Sacking
Companies are fighting back for quiet quitting and it's having a big impact.
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‘Confirming we are cleared to land?’ Who said what at Austin
Why the Austin airport situation was so dangerous.
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Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad
If you have a QA team, please read this and give them a large raise.
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I'm skeptical of low-code
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
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The costs of microservices (2020)
An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…
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Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…
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Some mistakes I made as a new manager
the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking
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The product manager role is a mistake
The popular model Software product companies aren’t usually started by people with a strong background in building software products. Those who most likely end up founding businesses are good at getting funding, and at understanding their target industry. They’ve been in their industry for a long time, know their…
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The ten year anniversary of the Healthcare.gov rescue
Ten years ago today, on Friday, October 18, 2013, the effort to fix HealthCare.gov began in earnest. At 7:15 A.M. Eastern time, a small group assembled next to the entrance to the West Wing of the White House. The group included Todd Park, Brian...
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The age of cargo cult Agile must end
Via LinkedIn, I learned about an article called “The age of Agile must end” by Michael Burnett, and I’ve since seen it pop up again in…
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Google Search Is Dying (2022)
(There is good discussion on this article on Hacker News and Reddit)
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Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
Of the biggest tech companies, only Apple has not executed major job cuts. But why is this, and can we now expect it to follow suit by shedding workers?
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The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?
Updated 10/25
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Things are about to get worse for generative AI
A full of spectrum of infringment
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Meta blocking news links in Canada
For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for…
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Tech CEO sentenced to 5 years in IP address scheme
Amir Golestan , the 40-year-old CEO of the Charleston, S.C. based technology company Micfo LLC , has been sentenced to five years in prison for wire fraud. Golestan’s sentencing comes nearly two years after he pleaded guilty to using an elaborate network of phony companies to secure more than 735,000 Internet Protocol…
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Apple Vision
Apple Vision is incredibly compelling, first as a product, and second as far as potential use cases. What it says about society, though, is a bit more pessimistic.
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Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…
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Cargo airships could be big
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce
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How to lose $950 quickly on Airbnb
How I lost $950 in about an hour on AirBnB by stupidly thinking it worked like a hotel
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"No, it's less effort than that"
Ever heard ‘No, it’s less effort than that!’? Learn why challenging Agile estimates can lead to bad planning and how to handle estimate pushback effectively.
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OpenAI is too cheap to beat
Data matters; infrastructure matters more