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Let's make sure GitHub doesn't become the only option
GitHub is dominant in today’s software development industry. Most professional developers interact with software created, maintained, or controlled by GitHub daily.
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Netflix's New Chapter
Netflix waited out Blockbuster with better economics, and it’s seeking to do the same with its competitors today; the key to the company’s differentiation, though, is increasingly creat…
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Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
I had the privilege of leading PlanGrid to $100M in ARR before I stepped down as CEO and passed the baton to Autodesk Construction. I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I have made in my first...
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Reddit is OpenAI’s moat
Interpreting Reddit's API changes in light of how it serves OpenAI.
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Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work
Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.
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Low Code Software Development Is a Lie
I’ve been writing custom software for a long time and one of the things that annoys me most is when a client adopts the position that there is a silver bullet which will reduce or remove the inherent complexity of this task. This happens more often than you’d think and guess what? They are almost always wrong. Perhaps…
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Just paying Figma because nothing else works
My family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised to avoid spending money whenever possible. I was also taught “it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools”, which apparen...
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The Deliberate Practice Guide (2021)
Deliberate practice is the key to expert performance in writing, teaching, sports, programming, music, medicine, therapy, chess, business, and more. But there’s more to it than 10,000 hours. Read to learn how to accelerate learning, overcome plateaus, turn experience into expertise, and enhance focus.
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How long it took different companies to find product-market fit
Part five of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business
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NitroKey disappoints me
A look at NitroKeys latest article
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Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
[I’ve added an update after watching the announcement.]
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Goodreads has no incentive to be good
Goodreads is full of trolls, spam, and harassment campaigns. They probably like it that way.
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Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation," a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:
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A student asked how I keep us innovative – I don't
Last week, I did a Q&A session for a friend's security class. One of the students asked a question that I loved. They asked something like, "As a principal engineer, how do you make sure your company stays at the forefront of innovation?"
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From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity
Cloudflare's R2 is an undiscovered gem and is redefining the economics of data storage
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How Equifax Became a Private IRS
At a Goldman Sachs conference in December, Equifax CEO Mark Begor told investors that his company has a monopoly in an obscure but important area - selling data about your salary to third parties.
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Japan has changed in important and visible ways
The 2020s are not the 1990s.
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Meta Layoffs
Words from Mark Zuckerberg on management and remote work.
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Web hackers vs. the auto industry
While we were visiting the University of Maryland, we came across a fleet of electric scooters scattered across the campus and couldn't resist poking at the scooter's mobile app. To our surprise, our actions caused the horns and headlights on all of the scooters to turn on and stay on for 15 minutes straight.
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Production AI systems are hard
The relationship between humans and machines. Click to read Methexis, by Kevin Fischer, a Substack publication.
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Harry Browne’s Rules of Financial Safety (1999)
When you read in the news that a person whom you know as rich and wealthy is in financial trouble or has declared bankruptcy, it is easy to feel a sense of futility about managing your own money. Y…
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AWS’s anti-competitive move hidden in plain sight
Folks have been making noises for a while that Amazon is anti-competitive in a variety of ways. I don’t disagree with the overall sentiment, but there’s one particular aspect of how AWS advantages its own offerings that I don’t see folks talking about–and strikes me as particularly egregious.
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From Bing to Sydney
More on Bing, particularly the Sydney personality undergirding it: interacting with Sydney has made me completely rethink what conversational AI is important for.
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Apple's Blue Ocean
I first read about the “ blue ocean ” strategy in a story (probably in Edge magazine ) about the Nintendo Wii . While its competitors were fighting for supremacy in the game-console market by producing ever-more-powerful hardware capable of high-definition visuals, Nintendo chose not to join this fight. The pursuit of…