Want to found a start-up? Work at one first!

Of the mental models and rules I use in my life, by far the most useful is to learn only one thing at any given time. If you get it right, you: Ensure work is the right balance of challenging for it to be enjoyable. Avoid stalling due to an overload of uncertainty. Learn better, and faster. This rule works for individuals but is also useful...

Last year I wrote “Looking back at 2022” and found it valuable to reflect and celebrate a year of work, even if just as a reminder of the things that happened before going into the next. So with another year having passed, time to try again! This time for my second full year working at incident.io. To contextualise the year, some milestones (see...

Recently, I’ve needed to add concurrency protections to several HTTP APIs. One endpoint was for updating a schedule, where incident.io customers would tell us about who was on-call and what hours they worked so we could generate a pay report. It would suck if another user was modifying the same schedule – maybe just to add a single user – and...

Most people are familiar with state machines and know their value. The average state machine library can help you model states, prevent invalid transitions, and produce diagrams that help even non-technical people understand how the code behaves. This article isn’t about making the case for state machines. It’s about how you take the concept of a...

From the moment you learn programming people tell you “don’t repeat yourself!” So what I’m about to suggest might sound odd. But I’m here to say that if you want to ship high-quality software at pace, you should be investing in abstractions that are designed to enable copy-and-paste. When you look at most software teams, they work within an...