This week
- We all know waterfall is bad. It's outdated, bureaucratic, ineffective, and makes you late for dinner. It's just a stupid thing we did in the bad old days, before we were taught better by a group of consultants at a mountain retreat. Or so the Agilists would have us believe....
Last week
- Hi friends, In September, Scour scoured 1.2 million articles (up from ~880,000 in August) from 28,568 feeds. Also, welcome to the 116 new users who signed up since my last product update email! Here's what's new in the product: 📚 Library and Article Tabs You can now find all of...
- Say hello to apps.chofter.com, the new home for everything I build. The speed at which I ship new things has massively increased with the advent of AI, and I’ve been encouraged by the fact that, as I approach my sixth decade, new ideas for useful & fun things to build still come...
- There are lots of skills involved in being a successful engineer at a big tech company. Running effective meetings, writing good design docs, fleshing out…
Two weeks ago
- Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which...
- A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software development such sensible defaults might include things like “use version control”, “separate UI logic from domain logic”, “automate...
- Agents are great at producing code. The valuable work left for you is deciding what should exist, how it should behave, and what you're willing to trade for it....
About a month ago
- Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building…
about 1 month ago
- 01 Sep, 2026 Hi friends, In August, Scour scoured 878,974 articles from 28,519 feeds. Also, 219 users signed up since my last product update email at the end of June so welcome to you all! If you've been enjoying Scour and would be willing to put a quote on the testimonials...
about 2 months ago
- I used an AI agent to make a big update to my GiftyWeddings.com website, taking it from a gift registry to a full website builder in 275 commits....
- A software factory is a repeatable loop around software work. If you’re building a software factory, code good enough to ship still needs human taste and ownership. We’ll discuss this including whether you need a factory just yet. If so: You’ll likely need humans in the loop...
- TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The...
- My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats — EPUB, Kindle, paperback (×2), and web — on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I built and published it the way I ship software....
2 months ago
- In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7.7B valuation, and back to zero again. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model....
3 months ago
- Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring more…...
- I've started a new company: Superlogical. I authored1 the announcement post on the Superlogical homepage, which describes the problem statement and what we're building.2 Read that to learn more. This post is more of a personal statement about what led to this, how it relates to...
- In the course of conversations with startups that I’ve invested in, that I advise, or that I simply encounter, it’s very common to get into discussions about prioritization. Some common situations that I hear about all the time: We don’t know how to balance incremental features...
- What is usage-based billing? Tokens, credits, and outcomes, explained in the controlled language of aircraft manuals. The unit changes. The meter does not. The post What is usage-based billing? Tokens, credits, and outcomes, explained in Simplified Technical English appeared...
- 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...
- @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...
4 months 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...
Rows per page
