DeFi will do to Banks what the Internet did to Newspapers
The early days of the World Wide Web were a heady time for newspapers.
3 Things DeFi Lending can learn from the Financial Crisis
Despite how different it is from finance, DeFi will need to grapple with three of the same factors that led…
The User is King (And Not)
If you want your product to be widely used—or to work on projects that won’t be shut down at the…
The Blockchain Wars
A few blockchain networks will eventually find a smart user acquisition strategy or game-changing technology (worldwide scalability) or a killer…
The ICO Bat-Signal
In Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon uses the bat-signal to summon Batman. The ICO, for all its mainstream criticism, was the…
Don’t Write Code
I’ll make an only partially hyperbolic exhortation: software engineers should write less code.
The Freedom of Ignorance
The freedom of ignorance is a simple observation for entreprenurship: what we don’t know is sometimes as important as what…
When Elvis Met Satoshi
Like a music fan naively asking “why can’t we all just love all forms of rock and roll,” those in…
Beware Engineering Media
The most common mistake you’ll make is to see engineering media as a mirror of what’s going on in our…
Pierce the Abstraction Wall
To be an effective developer, regularly aim to pierce the abstraction wall, especially when you identify a soft interface.
Think in Tradeoffs
There are very few silver bullets for becoming a better software engineer, but I’ll argue that learning to view most…
Beware Burnout
Why there’s so much burnout in software and what to do about it
Read Code
In software, plenty of people write code, but precious few spend time reading it—especially code outside their day to day…
Rationally Irrational
Why rational people get disruptive markets wrong and what to do about it
An Insider Guide to the Tech Industry
I grew up in a family of technologists in New Jersey, home of Edison’s Labs and the birthplace of the…
Four Startup Engineering Killers
In 2016, I gave technical advice to a first-time entrepreneur building a seed-funded food delivery marketplace. In my view, every…
Why Facebook has to focus on more than engagement: A response to a16z’s Benedict Evans
Benedict Evans, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently argued that Facebook’s users shoulder much of the blame for the company’s…
Centralization First
Though it may seem counterintuitive, these blockchain protocols should be centralized at first — and only decentralized over time. This avoids the diminished development…
What Open Source Can Learn from Slack
For anyone interested in having OSS compete with proprietary alternatives, you have to think about what important user segments value,…
The Tyranny of Values
We generally think of values as overwhelmingly positive. Instead, values are designed to encourage an outcome in a certain context.…
Why Crypto Contracts Matter
Cryptocurrencies offer us a powerful trifecta: they allow us to remove costly middlemen, reduce certain forms of regulations, and crucially,…
The Marketing Behind MongoDB
Countless NoSQL databases competed to be the database of choice. MongoDB’s marketing strategy helped it become the winner.
Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB
MongoDB got rave reviews for its usability. But other features mattered too when choosing a database for a growing startup.
Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?
NoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for “modern” web engineers and used by countless startups. What happened?
The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die
How alarming would it be if humans used popular horror films to decide what to protect ourselves from? We all…
How the Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism
What would you think if the majority of media coverage that a Middle Easterner read about America focused exclusively on…
Engineers and Ethics in Software
Every software engineer I’ve worked with has had a strong sense of personal values and ethics, but the organizations we…
The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-ring
With alarming regularity, there seems to be another terrorist incident, mass shooting, or police shooting in the news. We’ll see…
Breaking up with the Yankees
If it is loss that can lead to faith, then victory – a recent Yankees World Series (in 2009) –…