Today
- A lot of people simply don’t understand the degree to which competition matters in B2B software, and what competing effectively feels like. Competition is simply the art of increasing your win-rate when you and a competitor vie for the same customer’s business, and this is what...
This week
- @import url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Comic+Neue:wght@300;400;700&display=swap"); dt, .agile { font-family: "Comic Neue", sans-serif; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; font-size: larger; } dt { padding-top: 0.5rem; padding-bottom: 0rem; } Agile can be...
- The market is in a weird place right now, a lot of companies are making record profits, but at the same time every other company seems to think bankruptcy is around the corner. Both of these camps seem to use the same general strategy: cut costs and maximize profits. What mainly...
Two weeks ago
- 30 Jun, 2026 Hi friends, Many of you mistakenly got onboarding emails yesterday. I'm sorry about that. I was tweaking the way emails are sent to new users and accidentally sent it out to everyone. Don't worry, you'll get your weekly digest on Friday as usual. (If you got a...
About a month ago
- Here's a reproduction of the infamous "Waterfall Diagram", from the landmark paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems (Royce, 1970): SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS PROGRAM DESIGN CODING TESTING OPERATIONS Behold, the enemy of Agile! Although,...
about 1 month ago
- The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are...
- 7 Jun 2026Throughout my career, I've heard the same cliche repeated again and again. Here's some examples from the wild: "Customers don’t care about your testing at all. They care that the product works." "Users Don’t Care About Your Tech Stack" "First you must accept that...
about 2 months ago
- Ship fast. Fix fast. Speed is everything. Someone reports a bug. You fix it in 2 minutes. Not 2 hours. Not tomorrow. Right now. This is not about talent. This is about urgency. You have to feel it. Th...
- Replacing business SaaS applications with vibe-coded equivalents has been a topic of conversations for a long time now. But it feels like the build-vs-buy pendulum has truly swung to the “buy” apex in the last few months. Improvements in frontier models over the last six months...
2 months ago
- The Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC) document sitting in your governance folder is one of the most useful tools in the business. Most orgs never use it that way. They treat it as a compliance box ticking exercise, and teams see it as a governance burden at best. The SDLC is a...
3 months ago
- Hi friends, In April, Scour scoured 778,059 posts from 25,790 feeds. This month, my focus was on ranking improvements and adding a number of new features: 🔃 Ranking Improvements Scour is designed to find hidden gems that interest you, while trying to avoid using popularity...
- Figma's reliance on non-designer seats made it uniquely exposed to AI. Claude Design's launch deepens the problem....
- Last post I wrote about how you can approach buy in for your architecture. I’ve been thinking a lot more about the topic, and would like to delve a bit deeper into it. I still stand fully behind the post I wrote two weeks ago, but the more I think (and research) about it, the...
- 14 Apr 2026 RIP Agile, we hardly knew ye. And I mean that literally - because no one was ever clear on what it was. Agile washed over our industry like a tsunami. But whenever it was questioned, a voice (perhaps emanating from a gap in the clouds?) would invariably tell us "ah,...
- When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input...
- Spec Driven Development isn’t Waterfall Write down what you mean. After spending a few months writing (e.g. on the Kiro Blog), and speaking (e.g. Real Python Podcast, SE Radio) about spec-driven development, I’ve noticed a common misconception: spec driven development is a...
- “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” When Jeff Goldblum’s rock star mathematician - sorry, chaotician - spoke those immortal lines in Jurassic Park, none of us had any idea how the craft of software...
- It’s 2007. I’m working on a big rewrite (yes, I know) of a big system; a database-driven web app built in C#. A significant part of the project is just the code to get data in and out of the database. Object-relational mappers are still very much in their infancy; somebody’s...
- The most effective way to build software and get massive adoption is no longer high quality mainline apps but via building blocks that enable and encourage others to build quantity over quality.1
- Feed diversity overhaul, domain and topic affinity, inline reactions, and exact keyword matching....
4 months ago
- I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products. At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid of but never polished enough to be loved. Now I work on GitHub Copilot, which many people think is crap1. In between, I had some brief periods where I...
- Our era of sprawling, idiosyncratic tooling In 1998, Eric S. Raymond published the founding text of open source software development, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. In it, he detailed two methods of building software: The Cathedral model is carefully planned, closed-source, and...
- Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incredible amount of learning and...
- An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They...
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