Recent content in Posts on Tom Phillips
It is common for software engineering teams to deploy new versions of their software to staging environments before deploying it to users in production. In this post I argue that non-production environments are inherently wasteful and describe an alternative: the mono-environment . I was first introduced to the concept of a mono-environment in 2018 at a SaaS startup. We had a solid engineering…
Reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao , I was struck by how people associated with OpenAI believe in AGI. They really do think someone, perhaps them, will build AGI, and that it will lead to either the flourishing or destruction of humanity. Elon Musk founded OpenAI because he thought Demis Hassabis was an evil genius who would build AGI first: …Musk would regularly characterise Hassabis as a…
I’m learning Kotlin for a new job and I was confused by type-safe builders . They’re used to create domain specific languages (DSLs) in Kotlin. Two common use cases are configuring routes in Ktor server or building HTML . I think they’re confusing because they combine a bunch of Kotlin concepts. Here’s how I broke it down to understand it. Let’s start with a data…
For 16 years I’ve used an iPhone. I’ve owned maybe 4-5 models and my current one is an iPhone 11. The battery is knackered and I started to think what I’d do if I needed to replace it. iPhones are getting bigger and more expensive. The cheapest model, the iPhone 16e, starts at £599. I don’t want to spend that much money on a phone. Lately I’ve become uncomfortable…
Minimum viable product (MVP) has become meaningless business jargon. The problem with so-called MVPs is that no one learns anything from them. There is no hypothesis under test. If your MVP doesn’t unambiguously validate or invalidate a hypothesis, then it’s impossible to know whether you are succeeding or failing. What do you know about your customers? What problems do they have? How do they get…
Data build tool (dbt) changed the way many organisations transform data and do analytics. I think more change is afoot: I predict dbt Labs will adopt a proprietary licence for dbt Core and the project will fork. dbt Labs use the loose open core business model, where the primary functionality in dbt Core is covered under an open source licence ( Apache 2.0 ) with extra proprietary software wrapping…