I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to TikTok. All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could…

From each of our two experiences starting out as introductory-level engineers at Box, to becoming first-time managers overseeing five-person teams, then directors overseeing 30-50, and ultimately VPs managing hundreds, we've experienced software engineering from every angle. At every step of the…

Dec 12 2020 Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process), and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn't running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my…

When people get married, they are often quite sure that they will have a small, quiet wedding. None of these massive, extravagant parties with hundreds of people for us! We’ll just invite close family and friends. Then, you make a list of ‘close family and friends’… and realise why people have 100…

(5 minutes read) My oldest son Noah turned 7 three months ago. If he could trade his family for a 2 hour session of playing minecraft, he would do it in a heartbeat. The other love of his life is Supe

Some time back, I was working on a project where it felt like the timebomb of technical debt was exploding in our faces. We couldn’t refactor the whoositz because of the whatsitz and when we asked about the whatsitz no one knew about the whatsitz and how it exactly worked with the whoositz and there…

Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower. This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet insightful prune. Mostly, though, shower ideas are the incentive that keeps me smelling okay, so I…

A summary of today’s changes to 3.1.3 Other Purchase Methods: Your app must use Apple’s in-app-purchase (IAP) system for all purchases made in the app. Unless they’re purchases for goods or services that are consumed outside the app, in which case you are prohibited from using IAP. Unless those…