Bluesky is good

Not a lot to share this month; it was a particularly busy time, between a mystery (and now solved, without fanfare or closure) cough and a dearth of time to write as I started to explore easing back into full-time work. Still, some writing (and selfishly, I'm excited to end the year such that five essays is considered a "low" number for a month):...

Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology. (A psychologist might suspect that this was in no small part due to being legally...

At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; rolling out a new feature or code path; exposing a specific path for a cohort of users during a closed beta) and gates, which were meant to be explicitly permanent (overriding a statement...

I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis was selling his share of the company to Jack Ellis, the technical co-founder. [1] Anyway, the two thoughts: I think Fathom is a picture-perfect example of how to succeed in a niche that would...

I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the Stripes and Squares and Adyens of the world. It's tempting to think of...