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Tech interviews are not (that) broken
I constantly see the same complaints about job interviews: But those can be good software engineering interviews. The industry has become much better than it was when the complaints were: If none of these ring a bell, lucky you. Software engineering interviews used to be bad. They were bad in two different ways. Some were puzzles,…
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Applying least privilege to end-to-end encrypted dashboards
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…
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I got my hand in Apple’s cookie jar
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…
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When failure was an option
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…
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Your competitive advantage is your agency
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…
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The SaaSpocalypse is real, but not for the reasons you think
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…
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Constant Eval in Production, the idea
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…
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Culture goals should be achievable
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…
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A better monetization model for LLM applications
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…
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The Feedback Loop
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…
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The role of CTO should have no job description
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…
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Generating an all-files file in Windows, to verify backups
When I was 16 years old or so, one day, my computer didn’t boot. I got a blue screen with some white text-mode error. Something was broken with the file system. This was after being utterly disappointed by Windows 95 and before I became a Linux person, so I was running Windows NT 4.0. I…