They failed to capture the hill at Netflix. That small but vocal gang of employees hellbent on canceling Chappelle last year over his comedy special. Now comes the counter offensive from the executive in the form of newly updated cultural guidelines at the company: “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity ...
OopsAn “algorithmic stablecoin” sounds complicated, and there are a lot of people with incentives to pretend that it is complicated, but it Oops An “algorithmic stablecoin” sounds complicated, and there are a lot of people with incentives to pretend that it is complicated, but it is not.
MVP is such a profound misnomer; a good MVP is not viable, and it is certainly not a product. Chances are it isn't minimal either, come to think of it.
Linux announced that Rust would be the second official language supported in the codebase. That's impressive, considering Linux has been around for 30 years! Engineering discipline. Only five-ish* languages are approved to use within Google (Java, C++, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python, as I recall). Languages like Haskell or frameworks like Node.js are forbidden. Why? More languages means more tooling and workflows to support. More institutional knowledge needs to be shared and more speci
A very silly blog post came out a couple months ago about The Unbundling of Airflow. I didn’t fully read the article, but I saw its title and skimmed it enough to think that it might’ve been too thin of an argument to hold water but just thick enough to clickbait the VC world with the word “unbundling” while simultaneously Cunningham’s Law-ing the data world. There was certainly a Twitter discourse.
Netflix and the ability to stream on-demand, non-interactive media was a significant innovation in the last two decades. Streaming interactive applications over the internet is an exciting and logical next step. Here are three different products that implement interactive streaming applications. Streaming web browser (Mighty [https://www.mightyapp.com/]). The browser is the new operating system. More complex applications are run inside the browser (e.g., Figma, Google Earth) that can sometimes
Sarah Constantin (11/100 Substack posts) on Twitter: "Something around this topic seems really important, and part of it clicked for me just now. 🧵 1.) A promise is analogous to a debt. Making a promise = borrowing. Fulfilling a promise = paying back."
Something around this topic seems really important, and part of it clicked for me just now. 🧵1.) A promise is analogous to a debt. Making a promise = borrowing. Fulfilling a promise = paying back. https://t.co/jj6EccMhuC— Sarah Constantin (@s_r_constantin) May 15, 2022
Unstable pipedream: Terra's unravelling puts the spotlight on crypto’s ‘safe’ tokens
TerraUSD's collapse last week shows why algorithmic stablecoins aren't exactly stable Read this edition online Wednesday, 18 May 2022 Tokenised is your weekly read to navigate and mine the rich vein of crypto developments that flow through India and Southeast Asia.
When particles in the air on one side of the world can change the frequency of cyclones on the other, you know Peter, Paul, and everyone else is in the exact same boat Read this edition online
Elastic changes access to coding libraries to discourage AWS OpenSearch
After years of disputes between AWS and Elastic, the smaller company has now changed access policies to code libraries that are designed to make life harder for developers who aren’t using its commercial products.
Supabase raises $80M Series B for its open source Firebase alternative
Supabase, an open source alternative to services like Google's Firebase, announced it has raised an $80 million Series B funding round led by Felicis Ventures.
Paddle, the company that wants to take on Apple in IAP, raises $200M at a $1.4B valuation to supercharge SaaS payments
Software as a service has become the default for how organizations adopt and use apps these days, thanks to advances in cloud computing and networking, and the flexibility of pay-as-you-use models that adapt to the evolving needs of a business. Today, a company called Paddle, which has built a large business out of providing the […]
The Wordpress.com owner raised a lot more money, bought back more shares and still operates an internal stock market of sorts, which it plans to open source.
Arms race — Microsoft channel — Enterprise funding View email in browser | Forward this email By the Enterprise team May 16, 2022 Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: why cash-rich ransomware groups might be hiring AI experts sooner than anyone would like, Microsoft’s channel chief leaves the company, and this week in enterprise tech startup investments.
The last two years, I've hosted my blog with ghost.org [https://ghost.org/]. As the blog has grown, so have the costs. Later this year, I'll probably move to hosting it myself on AWS for a fraction of the cost ($0.25/mo vs. $25/mo), all with less than 100 lines of code. Self-hosting on cloud infrastructure has become so easy that I have to consider it. I think SaaS (in general) will start to look more like cars. Cars need maintenance and aren't fixable or debuggable by the average person, yet w
Technical debt is a bad word, but it doesn't have to be the Godfather's offer you can't refuse debt. Organizations do everything to fight the inevitable accumulation of debt (and fail). Yet, most code should and will need to be rewritten. What if I told you technical debt wasn't so bad? Technical debt is a tradeoff. In a perfect world, your stack would be infinitely modular – the ability to add arbitrary new features without refactoring, switch clouds or technology without pain, and never deal
There was a project announced this week that lets you write python scripts in HTML and have them execute in the browser (pyscript [https://github.com/pyscript/pyscript]). Here's an example. Hello world! This is the current date and time, as computed by Python: from datetime import datetime now = datetime.now() now.strftime("%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M:%S") Under the covers, this uses pyodide [https://pyodide.org/en/stable/] and WebAssembly. This is on
Monorepos have a U-shaped utility function – great for small and large projects, difficult for mid-sized ones. But there aren't many good monorepo frameworks out in the world. Lerna is deprecated, and even new upstarts like Turborepo are getting absorbed (i.e., acquired) into other companies (Vercel). Likewise, centralized version control tools like Perforce and large-scale build tooling (buck, bazel, pants) have struggled with adoption. As someone who continues to manage projects in a monorepo
Twitter's acquisition was one of my "Low Conviction" 2022 predictions [https://matt-rickard.com/2022-predictions/], but I certainly didn't think this would happen. Here are some of my unsolicited thoughts on what Musk could do with Twitter. Outsource Innovation While Twitter has had a few high-profile product launches in the last two years (Spaces, Fleets, NFTs), the product has been relatively stagnant for years. With the constant churn at the company (Jack gone, the go-private acquisition),
> When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience. – Warren Buffett When you start a company, you get three innovation tokens. You can spend them however you want – adopting a new framework, implementing a unique interview process, adding non-standard terms to a term sheet, 0r designing your own database all count as an innovation token. The standard advice has been to choose boring technology [https://mcfunley.com/choose-bor
> One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep. – Anton Chekhov Whenever I watch movies, I always pay attention to otherwise unrelated elements that seem to get a little extra screen time or one too many mentions. How could those elements foreshadow the plot? Chekhov's gun is a principle that says that every component of a story must have a reason, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Often you can predict
> We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code. – David Clark [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Clark] (1992) From the 1970s to the 1990s, the goal of building a global computer network was becoming more evident. However, how it would be built was one of the most fiercely debated topics in computer science. Some refer to the 1970s-1990s as The Protocol Wars, a period where competing standards [https://xkcd.com/927/] proliferated and competed fo
Startup Success – Good Growth, Gross Margins, CAC Payback, and Burn Multiple
Market gyrations and startup valuations have been the hot topics lately. With so much turmoil across the economy, it’s clear we’re still in for more pain as the world adjusts. On the st…