Topic
software
- Closed loops and AI
Just read this take from Elad Gil: AI will eat closed loops first AI will first automate away the things that are easier to form a closed loop learning system on. This is why code and AI research may be accelerated an…
- Agent-native architecture
The folks over at Every published this excellent guide to a new paradigm for software, using what they call "agent-native architecture." In short the idea is that your mental model for thinking about what you're build…
- Personal Software
A common problem I encounter with computers is the everyday minor friction in workflow: the repetitive but only occasional task, or the tedious multi-step process. Perfect example: the other day I wanted to batch resi…
- Ancient Myths and Open Source
Sam Arbesman finds similarities between the oral storytelling of myth. With generation retellings and small, effective adaptations over time, ancient tales were made more Lindy: Over time though, each ever-retold stor…
- Potluck
This paper describes an experiment to merge freeform document-style text and structured computations into a single interface. > We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regu…
- Chris Spiek and Ryan Singer on Shape Up
Reading Ryan Singer's Shape Up a few years ago was formative (or re-formative, or something) in my thinking on how product development can and should work. After that it was a rabbit hole on jobs-to-be-done, Bob Moest…
- The Simplest Thing
When working through problems, the most impressive creators to me aren't those that divine an entire solution in their brain for an hour, then slam out a perfect result (spoiler: this doesn't exist outside of the occa…
- Learnings from Palantir
Jason Lemkin with some interesting takeaways from Palantir's performance over the recent years. A couple of highlights: #2. Its Top 20 Customers pay an average a stunning $45m a year (!). And that’s 24% higher than a…
- Raycast
App launchers have been around a long time. Way back when it was Quicksilver, then it was Launchbar. A quick keystroke would pull up a search box, and a few letters of typing would open what you wanted. For many years…
- Software and Entropy
Marc Andreessen was recently interviewed by Noah Smith in his newsletter. It's a great post-pandemic update to Marc's views on technology (spoiler: he's still as optimistic as ever), following a year after his "Time t…
- Weekend Reading: Collaborative Enterprise, Algorithms, and Fifth-Gen Management
💼 Collaborative Enterprise Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software. 🤖 Seeing Like an Algorithm Part 2 in Eugene Wei's series on TikTok. See part 1. 🏫 Fifth Generation Manag…
- Weekend Reading: Software Builders, Scarcity, and Open Source Communities
👨‍💻 We Need More Software Builders, Not Just Users On the announcement of Airtable's latest round and $2.5b valuation (!), founder Howie Liu puts out a great piece on the latest round of changes in pursuit of their…
- Weekend Reading: Children of Men, Google Earth at 15, and Slate Star Codex is Gone
📽 How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and…
- Annotating the Web with Memex
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for "power users of the web." Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle. I'm a c…
- Spatial Software for Enhancing Interactions
Software has multiple dimensions of elements and affordances, but the spatial dimension is underutilized most software outside of the gaming world. Designer John Palmer wrote this piece on how different types of appli…
- Raindrop for Bookmarks
I found and started testing out Raindrop.io for managing bookmarks. Pinboard has been my go-to for this for years, to which I've added the resurrected Instapaper for anything like articles (to support Readwise flow).…
- Hardy Boys and Microkids
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers. Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, com…
- The No-Code Misnomer
I liked this newsletter post from Aron Korenblit on the no-code movement. The name overstates the problem as being with "code" in workflows, when the problem is really deeper than that: How we feel about code —and why…
- Weekend Reading: Software Dependencies, Conversational AI, and the iPad at 10
🛠Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging We've been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro package…
- Hyrum's Law
I didn't know this was out there, a funny-yet-astute-and-accurate observation from a software engineer at Google: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all o…
- Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells
🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the…
- Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
I love this story about Access and how it's still hanging on with a sizable user base after almost a decade of neglect by its parent. It goes to show you that there are still gaps in the market for software being fill…
- The Magic of Recurring Revenue
Any business that makes money from the same customer more than once can be said to have "recurring revenue." But the term in the SaaS universe has a more specific flavor to it, thanks to the unique nature of the busin…
- Readwise
I signed up for Readwise earlier this week after seeing it mentioned in Twitter somewhere. If you read a lot of ebooks on Kindle and make highlights, it's a useful tool for recall and remembering what you read. Each d…
- Elevate for Strava
Jason turned me onto this Chrome extension for Strava data analysis called Elevate. It's a pretty amazing tool that adds deep analytics on top of the already-rich data Strava provides natively as part of their Summit…
- Fermat's Library
This group is building some interesting tools to expose and enable sharing and collaboration on academic papers. We develop software to help illuminate academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous la…
- Wireframing with Moqups
Wireframing is a critical technique in product development. Most everyone in software does a good bit of it for communicating requirements to development teams and making iterative changes. For me, the process of wire…
- Weekend Reading: Product Market Fit, Stripe's 5th Hub, and Downlink
🦸🏽‍♂️ How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his compan…
- Clip Sharing with Overcast
Marco Arment just shipped a new update to Overcast (the best iOS podcast app) with an awesome new feature that allows you to clip sections to share. Since its early days you've been able to share a podcast episode wit…
- Sponsoring QGIS
We recently began a corporate sponsorship for the QGIS project, the canonical open source desktop GIS. I got back into doing some casual cartography work using QGIS back in December after a years-long hiatus of using…
- How Airtable Became a Unicorn by Reinventing the Spreadsheet
This post from Hiten Shah tells the backstory of one of the more interesting startups these days, Airtable. Like the title states, the objective of Airtable is to build a no-code system for data management and applica…
- Pinboard
I was a big del.icio.us "Delicious") user back in the day, pre- and post-Yahoo. For anyone unfamiliar, it was one of the first tools (before Twitter) for sharing web links and making bookmarks social. I signed up for…
- OpenDroneMap
Since I got the Mavic last year, I haven’t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. I’ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that I’ve mostly…