Geek, manager, coder, maker, author, entrepreneur
Years ago I built an application called Dashman. Customers used it to show web dashboards on screens around an office, a factory, a classroom, or a public space: Google Analytics, internal Grafana, shop-floor counters, org announcements, whatever they cared about as long as it was on web pages. This post is a retrospective on how [ ]
When I was building Dashman, I hit a wall that Apple s paid developer support told me was unsolvable. Then I solved it by reading the binaries in assembly until I understood them well enough to swap them out. A note up front: this happened a long time ago and I m writing it from memory. The [ ]
A few years ago, at Wifinity, around 4 in the morning, I made one of the hardest decisions of my career: I rolled back a migration we d spent months preparing for. We were migrating the production infrastructure of an ISP serving 200k+ customers. Traffic was already flowing through the new environment in read-only mode, the [ ]
I see a lot of grandiose statements floating around: You will not be replaced by AI, you ll be replaced by someone using AI. AI won t replace your creativity. AI can t do THIS or THAT. AI will never be able to do THIS or THAT. And many more. My take: maybe. Who knows! LLMs are getting [ ]
SaaS valuations dropped. The narrative is simple: AI lets anyone build anything, so why pay for software? They re calling it the SaaSpocalypse. I think part of it makes sense. But a big part of it doesn t. You don t buy code, you buy decisions When you buy a piece of software you re not just buying the [ ]
I’m sure this is not my idea, so I’m not claiming it to be. I’ve been wanting to do a sort of continuous AI eval in production for a while, but the situation never presented at work. It was a mixture of having the data to do the eval off line, and wanting to avoid [ ]
A company’s overall goals can shape its culture. Take the popular “Employee of the Month” idea, when employees see it as meaningful, it becomes ingrained in the culture and can motivate higher performance. But these goals need to be achievable, and sometimes making them achievable is a small matter of phrasing. Let me show you [ ]
Bring your own keys into an affiliate relationship I’m starting to observe a problem where a lot of LLM-enhanced apps are starting to pop up. For coding you have Cursor, but now there’s also a terminal called Warp and it costs $15/month. For individuals, consultants, small and even medium sized companies, this isn’t a workable [ ]
I work at a pretty amazing company, Canva, that has a culture of feedback. I think I have given and received more feedback in the two years I've been here than in the rest of my professional life put together. It has taught me something critical about the importance of a growth mindset. Managing several teams also gave me a lot of perspective here.
I ve been thinking about this one for a while. Imagine you are the CEO of a company and your competitors are getting ahead of you because they started to use ChatGPT to build their tech. You ask the CTO what s going on and the CTO says ChatGPT was not on my job description, so I [ ]