August 22, 2025
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11 minutes to read
Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vul...
March 27, 2025
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14 minutes to read
I have a lot of respect for Geoffrey Huntley. So when I read his blog posts about AI over the past couple of months: “Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you’re screwed unless you take action…” and “The...
March 8, 2025
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10 minutes to read
“You can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two” is how the saying goes, referring to the inherent trade-offs in software development priorities. It makes intuitive sense but utterly fails in re...
January 8, 2025
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1 minute to read
As of Monday this week, my company Petabridge turns 10 years old. I’ve been my own boss for longer, but my tenure at Petabridge is nearly 5x my tenure at every other company I’ve founded and at eve...
December 4, 2024
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21 minutes to read
If you follow me on Twitter / X, you have likely seen several increasingly exasperated tweets from me about a legacy software project from hell. This project deserves its own series of blog posts a...
October 25, 2024
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7 minutes to read
In this post we’re going to travel back in time to 2010 - a happier, simpler time for early-stage startup software developers. When Heroku was free and front-end developers hadn’t had a chance to r...
August 8, 2024
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6 minutes to read
When talking to members of our team about their projects and taking on more responsibility for their outcomes I will regularly recommend the following:
January 11, 2024
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9 minutes to read
Towards the end of 2023 I had some rare downtime and decided to use it to develop a new skill I’ve wanted to learn: leveraging .NET’s impressive Roslyn Compiler Platform to help Akka.NET users be m...
September 18, 2023
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5 minutes to read
One of the concepts that’s commonplace on software development Twitter / Reddit et al is the notion that management is ultimately responsible for everything that’s done by their employees - i.e. th...
March 8, 2023
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21 minutes to read
There are some software development best practices out there that are universally and unambiguously true outside of any specific business context - “use source control” is a great example. These ar...
December 6, 2022
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5 minutes to read
One of my favorite regularly occurring Twitter arguments is over what should be a simple and uncontroversial question: have you ever had to migrate to a different database in a production applicati...
August 17, 2022
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20 minutes to read
Ten years ago on August 10th, 2012 I wrote “Today I am Leaving Microsoft and Starting my Own Company” and cap-stoned my final day of working for someone else. Since then, I founded two companies:
September 1, 2020
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6 minutes to read
Periodically I receive inquiries from people in the startup community who are exploring an idea or want an estimate on how expensive this particular idea may be to implement - as is common in the e...
October 1, 2015
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9 minutes to read
I was asked by a close friend earlier this week about whether or not I have any references, books, or recommended reading for anyone wanting to get into startups. I don’t have a single source that ...
January 20, 2015
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15 minutes to read
January 14, 2015
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3 minutes to read
After wrapping up MarkedUp, I took some time off to consider my future. Travel. See old friends. Catch up on rest. During the entire time I was gone I received a steady stream of questions and inq...
December 27, 2014
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5 minutes to read
I had several friends and advisors review this post prior to publishing it; most encouraged me to go forward with publishing it but others cautioned that future investors / business partners may ch...
May 8, 2013
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1 minute to read
I was really surprised with the positive reception 10 Reasons Why You’re Failing to Realize Your Potential as a Developer received after it got picked up on Hacker News and a few other p...
March 26, 2013
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8 minutes to read
I came across a blog post by Michael Halligan on Hacker News last week entitled “Benefits matter, or why I won’t work for your YCombinator start-up.” As a fledging entrepreneur trying to attract se...
December 3, 2012
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5 minutes to read
Today was one of those days when it was nearly 1pm before I was free to sit down and make my daily to-do list. There was water damage in my apartment, one of our awesome engineering candidates took...
November 21, 2012
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4 minutes to read
My regular source of entrepreneurial catharsis is watching Deadliest Catch.
If you've never seen it, it's a Discovery Channel show that follows four-six actual fishing vessels during two different ...
October 16, 2012
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6 minutes to read
I posted a little while ago about the job market for technical talent at early stage companies, and I promised a follow-up post on what you should look for in a developer when your company is at a ...
September 23, 2012
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9 minutes to read
Shortly after leaving Microsoft to work on MarkedUp full time, my founding team and I joined an early stage accelerator here in Santa Monica. We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of value from it...
August 24, 2012
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11 minutes to read
Now that I’m running my own company and no longer speak on behalf of Microsoft or anyone else, I feel like I can speak a little bit more freely about some of the things I’ve observed ab...
August 10, 2012
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4 minutes to read
I’ve spent my last two weeks at Microsoft wondering how I was going to write this blog post.
Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News two years ago. In the Summer of 2010 I was still brus...
July 16, 2012
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5 minutes to read
And patience. This is intended for people who recognize that a need to change themselves, their environment, or whatever and are having trouble getting started.
Until last month, all of the books i...
August 3, 2011
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5 minutes to read
The LA startup scene is fascinating, having lived and worked in it for a year now - it's a scene teeming with brillaint people with big ideas, and it's starting to attract some major capital from t...
May 24, 2011
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2 minutes to read
I am pleased to announce something very exciting that Microsoft is doing in my neighborhood of Santa Monica, California: we’re putting together XAPFest, a massive Windows Phone 7 hackathon ai...
March 19, 2011
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9 minutes to read
I wanted to post this the morning after Startup Weekend Los Angeles concluded in late February, but due to the fact that I along with half my team (Minboxed) came down with the flu the following mo...
January 18, 2011
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3 minutes to read
I’ve been working on numerous projects since the year began, and on Sunday night I finally got around to watching The Social Network. My expectation was that the movie was going to be a ...
January 14, 2011
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4 minutes to read
I’ve a lot of friends who are proficient Rails developers, many of whom who have left .NET for Rails.
The one piece of consistent feedback that I hear back from them is that it’s the fr...
September 14, 2010
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I'm attending DEMO 2010 this week up in (somewhat) sunny Santa Clara, and during the early parts of last night's social media lounge event some members of DEMO's social media team shot a quick inte...
September 2, 2010
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1 minute to read
I alluded to a change in my employment circumstances in my previous blog entry, and now that I'm an official Microsoft employee as of Monday I feel extremely comfortable making this information pub...
August 16, 2010
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4 minutes to read
Today was my last official day at SmartDraw – I’ve worked for this great company for two years and saying all of my goodbyes was bittersweet.
Were it not for the fact that my new employ...
July 3, 2010
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7 minutes to read
One of the other things I took away from Code Camp was a bit of .NET culture shock. As you can tell by glimpsing around on this blog, I am somewhat enamored with the idea of starting my own busines...
June 25, 2010
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4 minutes to read
I wanted to take the time to follow up on some of the additional lessons I learned from my May startup project, some of which I already shared in The Myth of the Single-Person Startup.
This week&nb...
June 13, 2010
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5 minutes to read
During the month of May, 2010 I took an unpaid leave of absence from work for the entire month and set off to launch my own web-based startup company.
My objective was to take a month off work, s...