CTO 17 Sep 2023 · 4 min read CTO Skills: Much More Than Just Being a Great Engineer Today, I’ve stumbled upon a 2017 interview with Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and CTO of Airbnb. In it, Blecharczyk discusses his background as an entrepreneur and how he became involved Read more
Off-The-Shelf 16 Sep 2023 · 4 min read When Off-the-shelf Products You Depend on Shift Gears and Target Enterprise Airtable, a code-free software company once valued at $11.7 billion, has announced layoffs of 27% of its workforce, or 237 people. This is part of a plan to refocus Read more
Creativity 15 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Art Behind the Apps: Why Software is a Creative Act Building software products is a creative process, much like painting, writing, or any other art form. This became clear when I recorded an extremely short screencast demonstrating a product our Read more
Prioritization 14 Sep 2023 · 5 min read The Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand of Project Management I have a friend. Every message she writes begins with “URGENT! IMPORTANT!”. I’m not kidding. She does that because she learned that if she doesn’t add those words Read more
UI 13 Sep 2023 · 6 min read Why We Ditched Material UI for the Long Haul The house I rent right now near Ericeira, Portugal, has terrible plumbing for heating. Very few people care about heating in Portugal because winter here lasts only a few months, Read more
CTO 12 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Why Product Development Turns Into Herding Cats As Tech Teams Grow Have you ever noticed how things can look so perfect from a distance but less ideal upon closer inspection? It’s like planning a vacation and choosing a hotel based Read more
Remote Work 11 Sep 2023 · 5 min read Overemployment: Genius Hack or Unethical Practice? Santiago Valdarrama shared a story on Twitter yesterdat about an employee he had to let go. The employee was secretly working two full-time jobs at the same time. Santiago had Read more
Privacy 10 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Auto Industry is Sacrificing Your Privacy And Why You Should Care A few days ago, the Mozilla Foundation released the results of its research about data privacy in modern cars that they’ve conducted for their “Privacy Not Included” guide. The Read more
10x Developer 9 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Myth of the 10x Engineer Building Products in 10 Days The open-source software community is a beautiful thing. As a kid, I was amazed by the universe of software available to play with and learn from. In the early 2000s, Read more
Build vs Buy 8 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Perils of Putting Everything on One Square Have you heard already that Square is down today? This major outage has put thousands of businesses at a standstill. Founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey, Square Read more
Productivity 7 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Rat Race: The Dangers of Short-Sighted Employee Productivity Metrics In 2011, the film Moneyball brought data-driven decisions into the spotlight. The 2003 book by Michael Lewis told the story of Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager. Beane assembled Read more
Build vs Buy 6 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Custom or Off-the-Shelf ? Choosing Which Way To Go Is Like Shopping For A Campervan We’ve all faced this dilemma before — do we invest in an expensive, custom-built solution or go with a cheaper, off-the-shelf option? It’s a question that gives every builder Read more
Project Management 5 Sep 2023 · 4 min read The Context Switching Catastrophe: How to Save Your Engineering Team from Burnout It was the perfect storm. One of our lead engineers, Alex, had finally settled into coding a complex new feature that customers had eagerly awaited for months. Thirty minutes into Read more
Data Science 4 Sep 2023 · 3 min read Why Your Engineers Can’t Do It All: Building a Data-Driven Dream Team Acme Inc., a mid-sized retailer with 50 stores, wanted to use all the customer and sales data they had accumulated over the years. The CEO envisioned using analytics to optimize Read more
Data Collection 3 Sep 2023 · 4 min read Info Overload: How to Avoid Drowning in Crappy Data The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 is one of history’s most infamous maritime disasters. Over 1,500 lives were lost when the supposedly “unsinkable” ship struck an Read more
AI 2 Sep 2023 · 3 min read Is This Our “GUI Moment”? — Comparing AI Interfaces to Computing History The debate over whether the current wave of generative AI models like OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Bard, or Facebook’s LLaMa is really the start of a new era Read more
Stakeholder Management 1 Sep 2023 · 3 min read Engagement, Not Signoff: Building Partnership With Stakeholders The Apple Lisa was launched in January 1983, before the Mac. The launch wasn’t public, though. It was overshadowed by the Mac the following year. The Lisa was named Read more
No-Code 31 Aug 2023 · 4 min read Everything Old is New Again: No-Code Through the Lens of History In 2004, I landed a job as a junior system admin at a local ISP. The owner was a super tech-savvy guy. I’ll call him Peter to keep things Read more
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