# freckle (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 1 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover freckle. Page: Feed: --- ## [Two Captains, One Ship](https://www.kuril.in/blog/two-captains-one-ship/) _2026-05-05 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ We are happy each time we disagree, because we know we’re going to learn something new; it’s going to make some sparkle. —Bertrand Piccard, Swiss explorer The Late Night Slack Ping It’s 11:47 PM on a Tuesday night and I’m trying to figure out why our database is locking up in staging when the user hits three APIs in just the right order. We have a Freckle 3rd grade math… ## [The Last Carpenter](https://www.kuril.in/blog/the-last-carpenter/) _2026-03-26 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ It’s late, I’m on my second decaf, and I’ve been putting off adding a terminal to Kale for days — convinced it’ll be the usual slog of incompatible libraries, StackOverflow spelunking, and documentation rabbit holes. Then I remember: none of that applies anymore. I make a branch, chat with Claude Code for five minutes, and alt-tab away. Thirty minutes later, the agent… ## [Letting Go](https://www.kuril.in/blog/letting-go/) _2026-03-19 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ “Our goal is to inspire every person at Netflix to be excellent at their job. If you would not fight hard to keep someone at Netflix, we want to make it safe and quick to let them go.” — Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules The early morning playbook It’s 8:30am on a Monday; I’m never at the office this early, everybody knows I’m a night owl who rolls in dangerously close to… ## [Where Talent Hides](https://www.kuril.in/blog/where-talent-hides/) _2026-03-11 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ If you want to catch trout, don’t fish in the bathtub. —Popular saying 1. Rough awakening I hit the submit button on AngelList, finally uploading the job description (JD) that I had spent an hour putting together, format entirely cargo-culted from some trendy tech company’s careers page. For the first time in my life, full of hubris and hope, I was advertising a job for a company I had… ## [The Code Nobody Reads](https://www.kuril.in/blog/the-code-nobody-reads/) _2026-02-17 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. —Alfred North Whitehead It hasn’t even been a year since the launch of Claude Code, the breakout coding agent of the year. Together with its distant but equally competent cousin, Codex, the agents have proven to the software engineering community that real work can be done… ## [What "The Best" Looks Like](https://www.kuril.in/blog/what-the-best-looks-like/) _2025-12-28 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. —Arthur Schopenhauer The second that the next round of funding hits the bank, every new CTO starts obsessing over the same thing: Who the hell do I hire next? The answer is surprisingly non-obvious. You’re told that you always want—scratch that, need —the best of the best, your startup’s future depends… ## [What is a Startup CTO?](https://www.kuril.in/blog/what-is-a-startup-cto/) _2025-11-13 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ If you look at all of the C-level roles out there, the only one that has no template or definition is CTO. —Charity Majors It’s 2014, a couple of years since I started as the technical co-founder and CTO at Freckle Education, and I realize I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m running technology, I have a couple of developers reporting to me. We’ve just finished the Imagine K-12 incubator—which… ## [Which Game Are You Playing?](https://www.kuril.in/blog/which-game-are-you-playing/) _2025-10-12 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra The Paths In every early-stage startup’s life cycle, there comes a time when you have to decide what game your employees should be playing: the Grow the Pie (GtP) game, or the Grow the Resume (GtR) game. In the world of GtP we forget about the CV and impressive titles for a few years and agree to do… ## [The Fork in the Road](https://www.kuril.in/blog/the-cto-fork-in-the-road/) _2025-10-07 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ When you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra The Breaking Point: When You Can’t Do It All Anymore It’s 2016 and my company, Freckle, is finally seeing real traction with teachers. The self-serve freemium plan is bearing fruit and new classrooms are getting enrolled every day. Kids are hammering the service submitting millions of answers to math problems. We’re fighting to keep… ## [Telling Your Company's Story](https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-telling-your-companys-story/) _2025-10-05 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ Those who built the visionary companies wisely understood that it is better to understand who you are than where you are going — for where you are going will almost certainly change —James C. Collins Introduction: Hiring Is Storytelling Hiring is more than selling a gig, it’s about offering a story that people want to live inside. The founding myth. The gnarly obstacles yet to be overcome. The… ## [CLI-first decentralized compute (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/Npo7i7VNt5jq) _2025-10-05 · **Sponsored**_ Run and pay spare GPUs from the CLI — transcode, coinpay (DID+escrow), infernet (AI). ## [The Big Picture](https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-the-big-picture/) _2025-10-02 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive. —James C. Collins Growing Pains My first encounter with startup hiring was a rude awakening. First company I ever co-founded. First time manager. First time hiring an engineer who would be reporting to me. None of us had expectations of… ## [Genie, Take the Wheel](https://www.kuril.in/blog/genie-take-the-wheel/) _2025-08-21 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. —Donald E. Knuth How I Stopped Micromanaging Code and Learned to Love the Lamp Over the last two months, I went from zero to fluency with Claude Code’s take on vibe… ## [Why Game Devs Don't Merge Files](https://www.kuril.in/blog/why-game-devs-dont-merge-files/) _2025-07-29 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”. —Edsger W. Dijkstra In the world of gamedev, versioning mistakes can be expensive and irreversible. Two people working on the same character texture, complex material, or Unreal Blueprint can throw away days of work if they don’t realize both… ## [A Tale of Two Hiring Seasons](https://www.kuril.in/blog/a-tale-of-two-hiring-seasons/) _2025-07-19 · Home on Alex Kurilin_ Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. —Frederick P. Brooks Jr. The single biggest factor in your hiring success isn’t your brilliant recruiting team, your world-changing mission, or your A-list investors. It’s the weather. Not the actual weather, of course. I’m talking about the economic climate. Tech hiring markets are brutally seasonal. There’s Hiring…