Hi, I’m Brian. I’m originally from Fort Lee NJ, of Chris Christie Bridgegate fame, and spent several years living in Brooklyn NY before moving to Oakland CA. I went to college at a small, private technology school in Hoboken NJ called Stevens Institute of Technology, where I majored in Computer Science and graduated with High Honors. In my post-college professional life I’ve worked at a string of startups, including one I started that I refer to as “a great learning experience.” I was previously…
I spent the past week doing Instapaper support, which I do myself from time to time to get a sense of the top issues facing Instapaper customers and our support team. There are two big problems with Instapaper’s customer support flow: going from tickets in Zendesk to Instapaper users to debug accounts, and dealing with the volume of spam that Instapaper support receives. This time I streamlined…
After 18 years, the Instapaper blog is moving off of Tumblr in favor of Jekyll on GitHub Pages. For several years now I’ve been really embarrassed about the state of Instapaper’s blog. It’s been simultaneously the lowest quality part of of our web presence, and also the place where we made our most important announcements. I had dreaded the idea of spending a lot of time migrating and modernizing…
For the past two months, I’ve been using Cora, a website that connects to your Gmail and handles all of your email for you. Cora automatically organizes, labels, and archives your email. It then sends you a morning and afternoon digest with your emails to review.
One of my goals this year is to teach myself Machine Learning. I had the opportunity to work with a lot of ML engineers at Pinterest and DoorDash. Other than helping to define the problem, providing the inputs, and fetching the outputs, the whole process of building, training, and deploying models has been a black box to me…
I’ve been observing a growing shift toward a more Closed Web. At the core of this change appear to be fundamental shifts in the value exchanges between web publishers and technology platforms. Given that Instapaper is a product that relies on the Open Web, I’ve been thinking a lot about this shift, the underlying causes, and the impact to Instapaper & similar Open Web products.
Matt Ranney, a Principal Engineer at DoorDash, recently gave an interview called Microservices are Technical Debt. I had the opportunity to work with Matt at DoorDash, and we had a lot of conversations on this topic 1. Are microservices technical debt? I was strongly in the less-but-better-microservices camp at DoorDash. Like many things, there’s a balance to be struck. Microservices 2 are…
Today Instapaper launched Summaries, which is a feature I’ve wanted to build for a long time. Summaries help readers both understand an article before reading it, and help them recall the details of previously read articles. Building summarization features has become a whole lot easier with new tools and APIs, and this post will outline the technical details on how Instapaper generates its…
After almost 8 years in big tech engineering leadership1, I’m taking the leap to go full-time on Instapaper (again!) I have a lot of mixed feelings about the change: nervousness, excitement, and a bit of the old FUD… Has it been that long already?
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, my startup failed. We had run out of money, everyone was laid off, and I ran down my personal savings trying to make it work. I needed a job as soon as possible, and there was only one place I wanted to work: betaworks. At the time, betaworks was a startup studio in NYC known for building (bitly/Chartbeat), investing in (Tumblr/Kickstarter), and acquiring…
In 2020, our organization at Pinterest led the company in hiring from underrepresented backgrounds. Pinterest had set engineering-wide hiring goals of 25% women and 8% underrepresented engineers. Our organization vastly exceeded those goals, hiring 63% women and 25% underrepresented engineers in 2020H2. Building an inclusive and diverse team requires dedication and active participation at all…