Continuing our exploration of health-related companies that are fundamentally shifting our understanding of the industry, meet Emily Leproust, the Parisian founder of Twist Bioscience. An industrial chemist with a PhD in bioscience, …

Photo Credit: Heisenberg Media

The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.

There is no shortage of advice for how to navigate power dynamics within organizations — from managing toxic or exceptionally gifted subordinates to dealing with unpredictable and narcissistic bosses. Researchers have devoted entire careers …

It’s public knowledge that Google uses a single repository to share code — all 2 billion lines of it — and that it uses the trunk-based development paradigm.

In September 2016 I gave a presentation on managerial focus at the Calibrate Conference. In that talk I outlined the responsibilities of a manager and shared the tools I have been developing to decide which responsibilities to focus at any …

Does it feel like everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet not accomplishing as much as everyone would like?

This is part three of a three-part series on how we created a career path framework for the individual contributors at Spotify. Part one discussed the process we used to formulate the framework. Part two contained version 1.0 of our …

I’ve just released version 1.8 of both Keyring, and the Keyring Social Importers. This version includes a new service file, and an accompanying importer, which allows you to import content from a Jetpack-powered WordPress site, using the …

Growing vegetables in Colorado presents challenges, but growing vegetables in the mountains is harder still. This is due to the much shorter growing season, cool nights, wind, critters, and possible watering restrictions. For the purposes …

Now that I own my own house, and some of the technologies involved are a bit more stable, I’ve gotten into the idea of home automation a bit more. Here’s a quick run down of my current configuration.

Last year, Erika and I planted our first ever vegetable garden. We quickly became obsessed with it, and this year we’ve upgraded from 2 beds with approximately 50 square feet, to a total of 6 beds, with over 285 square feet (more than 5x …

In 1927, an enterprising magazine writer named William Dutton got an idea: Let’s find the most average man in America and see what he’s like. He scoured the country to find America’s most average town — Fort Madison, Iowa — and then …

Learn JavaScript using… JavaScript. Image via learnyounode.

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When you’re scaling quickly, you get a lot right, but you inevitably get some things wrong. The best companies — like Pinterest — are the ones that learn from those mistakes and adjust quickly.

Becoming the boss is an exciting transition, but it can also be a nerve-wracking one. This is especially true if you are now managing people who used to be your peers. You need to establish your credibility and authority, without acting …

I spend roughly 73% of my life thinking about web performance — hitting that sweet 60FPS on slow phones, loading my assets in the perfect order, offline-caching everything I can. Other examples.

Is that the sun? No, it’s our business. Read on…

Voice is a Big Deal in tech this year. Amazon has probably sold 10m Echos, you couldn’t move for Alexa partnerships at CES, Google has made its own and, it seems, this is the new platform. There are a couple of different causes for this …

I used to write a lot of Angular back in 2015. But recently, the JS community has largely moved on from Angular 1 to other libraries, and in turn, so have my projects. I always knew in the back of my mind that technology — and the knowledge …

A question I originally answered on Quora : What are some of the dark lessons that life showed you?

Are you good at your job?

I’ve been trying to make small improvements to the Keyring Social Importers package (and People & Places) that I maintain, and have made a number of them over the last few weeks. Here are some details of recent updates which you may have …

Example of message designed to remind harassers of the humanity of their victims and to reconsider the norms of online behavior. (Screen shot from Twitter by Kevin Munger/TMC)

Last week, Gallup released its State of the American Workplace study (read it here ). This is yet another of their comprehensive looks at what really motivates and engages employees.

We’re a two-person team building modern furniture in Denver, Colorado

Amazon’s Leadership Principles

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I attended the SaaStr Annual conference in San Francisco last week, and here are some of the notes I took in amongst the different sessions.

Toward the tail end of 2015, Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, came to a realization: The photo-sharing app he had founded five years earlier was straying too far from its roots.

Four days into 2017, Medium’s employees came to work and were told that one-third of them, 50 people, were fired.