Board

An overview of Datadog's platform, and where it is taking it next.

A look at where DevOps tools are going.

And why that’s not a bad thing at all Read this edition online A paid 🔒 weekly emailer that explains fundamental shifts in business, technology and finance that happened over the last seven days in India.

When you hear the phrase “cloud native,” is Kubernetes the first thing that comes to your mind? It is for me, and I expect I’m not alone.

TL;DR: Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies. We care about privacy, so unlike some other freemium models, you and your data are not the product. Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans. I know, it sounds too good to be true. Let’s see some details.

Last week I was talking to an accomplished entrepreneur and I asked what trait he saw in another entrepreneur that made her successful. Without missing a beat, he said she was a probabilistic think…

Being indispensable at work sounds like job security. For me it was a trap where years went by where I didn't learn anything new.

Netflix’s earnings were not only bad on the surface, they were arguably worse than they appeared.

Why my proposal for Twitter is different than Bluesky, more on moderation, and exploring what is next for Twitter

Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients.

> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. The law is also known as Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment. Last December, Zoom announced [https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/23/22197057/zoom-email-service-calendar-app-microsoft-google-competition] plans to expand to new products – including possibly an email service. Even tools that are the best examples of the Unix philosophy [https://matt-rickard.com/instinct

Low churn rates have been the cornerstone of enterprise SaaS. Once you signed an enterprise contract with Oracle, you weren't getting out of it anytime soon. A reader of this blog once sent me this adage, > Mainframes don't get replaced. They get shutdown when the company goes out of business or gets sold. Times are changing. It's never been easier to create a SaaS company, and customers have more than realized the trade-offs of vendor lock-in. 1. Customers are increasingly pushing for data s

How do you design an API? Most APIs are a mishmash of "REST-like" and freeform dynamic typed JSON. However, some more mature organizations have API-style guides. Schema-driven development is a better alternative. APIs are defined programmatically with schemas. These schemas are often written in JSON (OpenAPI) or some interface definition language (IDL) – e.g., .proto or .thrift. These files are then compiled into language or platform-specific stubs for clients and servers. Schema-driven develo

Cathedrals are intricately designed places of worship that have become too sacred to change. Building them required serious planning and thousands of man-hours. Compare that to bazaars, which were public forums that constantly changed – new merchants came and left, new products arrived and disappeared. This distinction was applied to different forms of open-source development in The Cathedral and the Bazaar [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/] back in 1999. It

New technical wedges [https://matt-rickard.ghost.io/wedges/] are difficult to spot. But one is quietly taking hold for developers. Language servers and their protocols. Most language services (autocompletion, linting, renaming, formatting) are handled by the IDE. These services require a deep understanding of language semantics, but aren't usually satisfied by a compiler or other tooling. Language Server Protocol (LSP) has quietly become a standard integration point, and thus a technical wedg

Logs are expensive in the cloud era. Collecting the telemetry is fairly cheap, but streaming terabytes across the network, storing them, and running continuous analyses on them gets expensive, quickly. Too many enterprises have been shocked at their monthly bill from Splunk or Datadog. Legacy architectures like Splunk are already prohibitively expensive for enterprises (you can see this reflected in the company's performance – the stock is trading at pre-pandemic levels). Even as the company is

Competition over scarce resources is at the heart of our evolution as a species and the success of Western democracies. We are the product of millions of generations of survivors who bested their rivals for food, shelter, and mates. From two single-celled organisms competing over an energy source to a pair of sisters grinding through […]

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced NFTs are coming to Instagram. What does that … mean? The announcement was a word salad of platitudes, so we don’t know how the Zuck will bolt this latest thing onto his Frankenstein product structure. The good money is it won’t work — Meta is one of the best acquirers […]

A (thing) recently announced their launch along with a big venture round. I used (thing) intentionally not to omit their name but because I have no category to put them in. In their press coverage they refused to be put in a category, instead calling themselves a new kind of digital media solution or something like that. While this can work for a launch since it gives an angle to the story, it can also be dangerous. The reason is because customers need to put you in a bucket. Physical or mental. If you are looking to sell media to agencies, you better be able to align to one of the buckets that they use to plan and buy media against: site, portal, network, dsp. Otherwise you literally don’t have a place on a media plan. That’s the physical bucket. If you are calling on publishers or brands, it can be a little easier, but you then spend more time educating them on why you’re not a x, y or z but a (thing)! And then potentially having the conversation go in a direction other than talking to them about their business and how you can help. That’s the mental bucket.  In both cases the LUMAscapes are good bucket guides. A lot of this stems from companies not wanting association with a category since they don’t like the current players’ recent funding valuations or exits. Which I understand, but I don’t agree with. If you started this business than you believe in it no matter what the category. So rather than spending time talking about what you’re not, just own it. Talk about why you started it, the limitations of the current solutions and why you are better. Your clients will appreciate it and you’ll gain credibility as well. Don’t try to be the first (thing).

Software development is not all clean code and automated processes -- and it never will be. Buyers and vendors both need to realize this.

Observability is a powerful concept in microservice-based applications, but be careful you aren’t biased toward the surviving data.

We launched Pebble on Kickstarter 10 years ago today! It was an amazing ride and I learned a lot from the experience. Story time…