Why are new startups growing so fast?&#Why is the wage distribution getting larger for software engineers?&#Why do I love infrastructure?&#Is open...

   Writing code for a computer is hard enough.&#You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive.&#Then you break...

   As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python.&#It turns out, ignoring some...

   CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity...

   Long story short: I’m working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think...

   This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my...

   Hi It’s your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think,...

   Here’s a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically...

   This isn’t as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day: I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different...

   I guess I should really call this a parable.&#The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (4 people) at a mid-stage startup (...

   Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular...

   I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years,...

   It’s a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I’m an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is...

   I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd advanced consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In...

   We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that club . But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I...

   Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me. Getting it right is obviously extremely important. Compensation is...

   Hanlon’s razor is a classic aphorism I’m sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I...

   Let’s consider a toy model where you’re hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It’s not very important what those are, so let’s...

   I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn’t my first interest in Koch I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple...

   Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately the tech team has...

   My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I’ve suspected for years that the classic buffet...

   No one asked for this, but I’m something like 12 years into my career and have had my fair share of mistakes and luck so I thought I’d share some....

   This is a blog post originally featured on the Better engineering blog. If you want to link to this article or share it, please go to the original...

   Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It’s hard to come up with an unbiased...

   When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more...

   A modern tech stack typically involves at least a frontend and backend but relatively quickly also grows to include a data platform. This typically...

   It started with a tweet: New years resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates- Erik Bernhardsson ( bernhardsson)...

   This is a bit of a rant but I really don’t like software that invents its own query language. There’s a trillion different ORMs out there. Another...

   I get bored reading management books very easily and lately I’ve been reading about a wide range of almost arbitrary topics. One of the lenses I tend...

   As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I’m the author of Annoy, a library with 3,500 stars on...

   Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things: I really struggle with the term microservices. I can’t put my finger on exactly...

   I have done roughly 2,000 interviews in my life. When I started recruiting, I had so much confidence in my ability to assess people. Let me just...

   I’ve been reading up on operations research lately, including queueing theory. It started out as a way to understand the very complex mortgage...

   I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept...

   UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks &#One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest...

   I’m interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we’re looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and...

   Turns out having a toddler isn’t super compatible with reading. I used to read 100 books year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe...

   I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about...

   I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading to my departure was that I went from a maker to a...

   I had an interesting idea a few weeks ago, best explained through an example. Let’s say you’re running an e-commerce site (I kind of do) and you want...

   I’ve been a bit bad at posting things with a regular cadence lately, partly because I’m trying to adjust to having a toddler, partly because the hunt...

   There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it’s well known that retention has a super strong impact on the...

   A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I’m going to go out on a limb here claiming that the...

   Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok...possibly...

   Here’s a dumb extremely accurate rule I’m postulating for software engineering projects: you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right...

   I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog - in particular the post When machine...

   There’s about 765 million blog posts about the diversity memo that leaked out of Google a couple of weeks ago. I think the case for any biological...

   I just spent a few days in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. Even though we were on the west side of Italy, the Mediterranean sea was to the east,...

   I’ve written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn’t necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I’ve built up...

   Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny. I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and...