Musings on code, people, banking
I stopped drinking 6 months ago. I've known I had a drinking problem for about five years, I think. "Known" is a fiddly word to use because it implies that I was confident that I had a drinking problem, which isn't accurate. For me, "known" was five years of wondering - am I drinking too much? Going from days in which I felt confident this was fine, this was normal - to feeling whether or not this…
We're all a bit tribal, at the end of the day. Here are my tribes: The Creatives. Those who have a spark in them that they can't contain, that begs to be shared with the world. Blessed in their ability to enrich the life of those around them. The Outsiders. Those who do not have the gift of belonging. Blessed in their ability to make their own tribes. The Sick. Those who have been cursed with…
Between the pre-seed and seed rounds for Griffin we pitched nearly 200 different investors. These are some of their reasons for saying no. It's too early 1 *sound of investor ghosting* Brexit The market is too small The market is huge, but only if you expand to the US, which we don't think you can do The market is huge and has experienced massive growth but we feel there is no more growth to be…
Earlier this year I talked to a number of investors who were SO smug about the fact that they "knew" that Revolut was about to get a UK bank license. It’s now May, and they still haven’t. (UPDATE: Revolut finally received authorisation more than a year after this post, in July of 2024) I've never met Nik, and I don't have any unique insight into what's actually happening with Revolut's…
Every year I try to write a little something - a manifesto for the year. I did so in 2014 , and again in 2015 . I skipped last year, largely due to being busy and having too many irons in the fire. A lot has happened in the past two years. I wrote a book, Learning ClojureScript . I became very active in the open source Clojure community, creating editor and build tool plugins like ultra ,…
I just got back from a month of traveling in the UK and in Italy. What follows are some miscellaneous thoughts about traveling, Italian culture, and Italian cities. Public toilet seats It turns out that Italians have what I would describe as an insane fear of public toilet seats. This causes people to stand on the toilet seat to use the bathroom ( I'm not making this up ), which ends up breaking…
One of the things I've been struggling with lately is how to go from being a senior or somewhat experienced engineer 1 to being an exceptional engineer 2 . To be clear, I'm not talking about reaching a level of global fame (i.e. on the same level as Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Rich Hickey, or whoever else you idolize). What I am referring to, more generally, is how to get to a place in which…
My friend Keith Ballinger used to post on his blog about once a month with a list of what he was reading. I'm nothing if not a thief, so here's what I'm reading right now: Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software Keith recommended this to me when I asked what he thought the best book on distributed systems was. It's a little dated at this point but most of the patterns and…
I was working on a pretty big post last year when I was sidelined with a new job and started writing a book, Learning ClojureScript . Working on the book has given me a lot of opportunities to explore areas of the ClojureScript ecosystem that I wouldn't otherwise have explored, and some of the learnings that have resulted have been pretty cool. Specifically, two of the things I've been learning…
I spent most of my labor day weekend experimenting with ClojureScript. The last time I took a serious look at ClojureScript was about 18 months ago, and the language and its ecosystem have unquestionably come a long way. There are some really, really cool projects being worked on - Figwheel automagically recompiling and pushing updated client-side code to the browser on write and some of the work…