On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google . The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I…
YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.
Although this article isn’t related to any of the 12 Challenges so far, it’s on a subject I’m developing for a potential future challenge.
The ZSF has posted their own announcement which clearly explains their mission and specifically what the money will be used for. Instead, I want to talk more broadly about why we've decided to support ZSF.
What constitutes managerial competence? As a vague starting point for an answer, we could say that competent management sets achievable objectives and then achieves them, by organizing and incentivizing the necessary work.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been working in billing and payments at Justworks . This experience introduced me to the world of bookkeeping and accounting in ways I didn’t expect: I took a course and read a textbook in accounting, adopted plain text accounting for my personal finances, and worked in a double-entry…
Software engineering salaries come from one of 3 budgets. Which budget pays your salary shapes your day-to-day and influences your career trajectory
This was several years back. Keep in mind that early in my career, my father had told me that doing a good job often meant doing what needed to be done in spite of your boss. And by that he meant that you can either make your boss successful and happy or you can run every decision by your boss. In which case no one is…
Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?
A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
Update 2024-12-02 : There was a lively discussion about the post on Hacker News you might also find interesting: link to thread.
This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F'ing up the status quo and fixing education. Here's a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Now, here's a trickier one: how do you fix this mess…
Why do startups typically fail? It turns out that "avoiding those things" is already a plan for success.
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
No More Blue Fridays: How eBPF is already being adopted to prevent kernel crashes.
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…
Google search results are becoming annoying to use and Open AI is about to eat Google's lunch.
Maybe it’s the change of weather. Fall often finds me looking backward, to the past — and anyway it is as good excuse as any as to why I have found myself peering into old hard drives trying to recover old bits and bytes from games that I wrote some thirty-five years ago or so.
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
Algorithms are no longer a Get out of Jail free card. The Third Circuit ruled that TikTok must stand trial for manipulating children into harming themselves. The business model of big tech is over.
With 380MM MAUs, Roblox probably counts more players than the entire AAA gaming ecosystem, is more played than Disney+ is watched, and is starting to rival smaller social networks in scale. But Roblox has yet to profit. How can it become a business comparable to its operating scale?
When I was still working at Faculty , we took on a new client that was not yet named Matter . We eventually transitioned from an agency-client relationship to a startup relationship, where I became the VP of Technology. This is what I’ve been doing for the past two-ish years.
Gross incompetence or purposeful deception?
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
My hypothesis was that Uber seemed to be picking a higher price because I had credits in my account. I might be willing to spend more because my 'real' out of pocket cost was less, and those credits were trapped anyway. I decided to use my Uber credits for Uber Eats instead. That pricing seemed normal.
Lidl is launching sovereign cloud computing in Europe. GDPR and data compliance is driving the EU to look for local alternatives.
Due to UK disclosure requirements, it's possible to examine the P&L of the privately owned/controlled OnlyFans. And the results are shocking.
