Chart the course, set the pace, hold the line
I break the essential responsibilities of the company executive into three distinct buckets. They are: 1. Chart the course Where are we going? What are we building? Who is it for? Any executive running anything has to know the answer to these questions in order to lead anyone anywhere. If you don't have a clue where you're going, any r...
Beware the leviathans
I've been pleadingwithantitrustauthorities around the world to do something about Big Tech for years now. Especially with those awful app store monopolies that have been choking out developers left, right, and center. But now that something finally looks to be happening, I'm suddenly concerned that it might, and that we'll end up wishi...
Avoiding pile-ups
One of the reasons we work in six week cycles, is that it gives us a different definition of later. When you work on really long projects — say 3, 6, 9 month projects — or projects that don’t have any end in sight, “we can do that later” typically means you’ll get to it eventually, as part of the current project. Long time frames give ...
Developers are on edge
It's a double whammy of anxiety for developers at the moment. On the one hand, the layoffs are dragging on. The industry has shed more jobs in a shorter period than any time since the dot-com bust over twenty years ago. Seasoned veterans who used to have recruiters banging on their door nonstop can suddenly barely get a callback. And n...
Be less precious
The essence of the book Radical Candor is the concept of ruinous empathy. That by trying your best to couch employee performance feedback in overly gentle language, you end up confusing the message, and cheating the recipient out of the clarity they desperately need to improve – or prepare for what happens if they don't. This concept e...
Google's sad ideological capture was exactly what we were trying to...
The Gemini AI roll out should have been Google's day of triumph. The company made one of the smartest acquisitions in tech when they bought DeepMind in 2014. They helped set the course for the modern AI movement with the Transformer paper in 2017. They were poised to be right there, right at the fore font of a whole new era of computin...
Could Apple leave Europe?
Apple's responses to the Digital Market Act, its recent 1.8b euro fine in the Spotify case, and Epic Sweden's plans to introduce an alternative App Store in the EU have all been laced with a surprising level of spite and obstinacy. Even when Steve Jobs was pulling power moves with Adobe and Flash or responding to Antennagate, we never ...
Committing to Windows
I've gone around the computing world in the past eighty hours. I've been flowing freely from Windows to Linux, sampling text editors like VSCode, neovim, Helix, and Sublime, while surveying PC laptops and desktops. It's been an adventure! But it's time to stop being a tourist. It's time to commit. So despite my earlier reservations abo...
Apple is in its Ballmer era
During Ballmer's reign as CEO of Microsoft, the company always made plenty of money. While the stock traded sideways, Ballmer made sure it was still raining dividends. Yet, today, that era of Microsoft is not looked upon too fondly. It's seen as being anchored in the company's historic paranoia, Windows-centric world view, and as missi...
Hooks, towel bars, and software
Strangely, a recent bathroom renovation crystalized my perspective on product development. When being asked to choose between towel hooks or a towel bar, the choice was obvious: Hooks, of course. Hooks take up no space. Towel bars suck up space. Hooks hold towels no matter how you place them. Towel bars require towels to be balanced le...
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