His emaciated body was discovered in a tent, just a few miles from a major Florida highway. His identity—and troubled past—were discovered by the internet. Sometimes the most alluring stories we tell

Jan 7, 2021 • 10 min read No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money,

Posted on December 24, 2020 According to conventional wisdom, if you earn 31€/hour, and a task costs less than that to outsource, then you should always pay someone else to do it. For example, if your

Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered

This is a continuation of last week's post . Read it first or this won't make much sense. One clarification from last week that several people pointed out is that my definition of Beta was too simple

I'm 21, but I've been blogging for almost 10 years. I grew up doing this. What I've written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I've written is in Italian, but I was also quit

Standing up and managing a service or building a custom service is a common desire for engineers. It’s usually a major mistake, that ends up costing a ton of time and money.The desire to build custom

In my last post I examined how first principles thinking fails. This post is going to be about a single, concrete example — about an argument that started me down this path in the first place. A coupl

Devin Kelly | Longreads | September, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,304 words) Read more by Devin Kelly! Check out his first Longreads essay “ Running Dysmorphic ” and his second, “ What I Want to Know of Kindn

Permalink Tynan Tynan Profile 3231 posts Ban User Creator of SETT. Adventurer. 2 months ago 13 6917 0 Last summer I got to travel to Uzbekistan with some friends from the area, and we were randomly in

Share Mail SMS As the first crop of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being rolled out, we can start to see the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Still, in the US alone there will probably be another 20

Why software ends up complex Mon, Nov 30, 2020 Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a userinterface, is generally regarded as a vice. And yet complexity is exceptio

We know of fish as a healthy food, but pregnant women are told to limit consumption. Do the health benefits of eating fish outweigh the risks, particularly as stocks grow more depleted? F Fish has a r

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal . It's a line repeated so frequently, in the era of smartphones and so

Luan Luan is designed for simplicity and readability. It rejects the complexity of modern software. It is mature software that I have been using for years for web programming. Whether Luan will appeal

Some people are not satisfied with a webcam from their notebook or an old webcamthey bought many years ago. My brother decided he wants to try streaming. Some people can just do a thingand other peopl

A year in blogging I started this blog in May of last year. I don’t mean to brag, but by last April, after less than a year of blogging, I was pulling in upwards of 20 visitors per day , several of wh

Abraham Lincoln. Winston Churchill. Nelson Mandela. We honor our leaders and always have. In both public and business life they are treated with almost godlike reverence. I guess that’s why we compens

95%-ile isn't that good Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sound

Adapted from our book and video series, Refactoring UI . Ever used one of those fancy color palette generators? You know, the ones where you pick a starting color, tweak some options that probably inc

When building any technology product, one of the most common pieces of advice is “talk to your users.” But the default way most of us talk to customers and prospects is unscientific and fraught with c

I should have loved biology I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. In the tex

You know that thing where everyone on a software engineering team turns up and just writes code for eight hours a day and then later the project is successful? No you don't. Projects don’t work like t

Toma Vagner I first encountered Erik Seidel the way many poker newbies do. I was watching Rounders , the 1998 Matt Damon movie about a brilliant law student who pays his way through school with his po

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 abo

Introduction Last updated: Nov 12th 2020 This document is an updated list of the supplements/drugs that Itake daily, as well as notes on some other interesting substances. Itcontains information on ex

It's a tough choice... Download PDF Credit: JACEY This is a warning. Please read carefully. By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. Fo

Your coworker asks you a slightly unclear question. How do you answer? I think asking questionsis a skill (see How to ask good questions ) and that answering questionsin a helpful way is also a skill!

If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional , they’d write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who’ve worked it out. The abov

Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies i

A lot of people look to Citus for a solution that scales out their Postgres database, whether on-prem or as open source or in the cloud, as a fully-managed database as a service. And yet, a common que

We live in times of great disaggregation, and yet, seem to learn increasingly from generalists. In the past, an expert in one field of Psychology might have been forced to teach a broad survey class.

“I don’t remember a damn thing.” The book I held my hands was full of highlights. It seemed like I’ve got all colors of the rainbow on a page. Apparently, this didn’t help. When I tried recalling idea

Do you have the pleasure to live or travel in a sandy location? Tropical beach, rolling sand hills or maybe it’s the desert for work. No matter where your sandy destination is be alert of the challeng

What career advice do you get as an employee of a growing company? Do great work, keep yourself challenged, focus on learning at every step, find mentors, mentor others, crush your OKRs. Every few qua

Hoanh An Jul 6 · 21 min read Principles and practicalities of data systems and how to build data-intensive applications. I. 4 fundamental ideas that we need in order to design data-intensive applicati

Writing a book: is it worth it? Published by Martin Kleppmann on 29 Sep 2020. My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed themilestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was th

Should you join a big company or start a startup? This frequently debated question paints a picture of a world where the only choice is between being a cog at a giant semi-monopoly, or taking investme

My career as a developer started 5 years ago. Before that I have 15 years work experience from other roles, and I‘ve been thinking about what I learnt from all those jobs I had before. Questioning pre

Thanks to all the coding bootcamps out there, many tech teams hired their first junior developers last year. Many more are now considering it, and debating how to go about it. Looking at the community