In 2004, ten years after Netscape launched, Tim O’Reilly launched the ‘Web 2.0’ conference, proposing (or branding) a generational shift in how the web worked. There were lots of trends, and none of them really started in 2004, but to me, …

Lately we’ve been on a bit of a tear internally working to eliminate operational complexity from our business.

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We were keeping our eye on 1984. But it’s Brave New World we should have feared instead.

Benedict Evans at a16z recently tweeted the following:

Do you ever feel like your entire life is on a schedule

David Friedberg is a serial entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley, having started a number of notable companies including The Climate Corporation, a climate-prediction startup, Eatsa, an automated quinoa-based fast food chain with no …

Once upon a time we categorized companies into two broad categories with regards to decision making: Centralized & De-centralized. This model is easy to comprehend when we think of a central headquarters housing centralized functions and …

Towards the end of last year, I jumped on the Kickstarter bandwagon for a new backpack. They blew their goal away, and it turned out to be a really professional release that went smoothly, and delivered on time. Major kudos to the folks at …

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These opinions are entirely my own, distilled from my experience at Dropbox in 2012–2015 as well as working with other startups. Since it’s been a few years, I’m sure Dropbox and their process look quite a bit different now.

I remember working as a developer at a company and complaining that I had no idea what the bosses did all day. It felt like while we engineers were working hard and shipping stuff, managers just talked to a lot of people all the time, or …

How do you work best throughout the day?

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others,” the great seventeenth-century French physicist, philosopher, and inventor Blaise Pascal …

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.)

This manifesto documents my minimalism and simple living guidelines.

“I need to give my notice. I’ve found another job.”

First off, I hate using the term micromanager***,*** it is so negative. Before deciding to write this post, I read a few articles just to make sure my experience matched the general consensus regarding micromanagement. I certainly do not …

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3. Track and control all devices at home and automate control. Installation in less than a minute.

I have both of these devices at home, and have had them each for a few months (at least now). I got the Amazon Echo first, so have had it for a lot longer. I grabbed a Google Home because they were on sale and I wanted to compare the 2 …

It’s a warmer-than-average December day in Selmer, Tennessee. A diverse group of farmers, from teen-aged to late fifties, are all waiting around patiently, mingling and sipping coffee. Everyone has a name tag with his or her home state on …

Today I pushed some updates to:

You probably do a lot of one-on-one meetings at work: with your manager, teammates, folks from other teams. Unfortunately, most people totally waste their 1:1 time. The problem: the 1:1s aren’t awkward enough*. Here’s how to make them …

It’s an Engineering Manager responsibility to guarantee the team health measured in terms of qualities such as performance, commitment, accountability and predictability (among lot of others). However this can’t be forced by the Manager. …

Photo by Leticia Chamorro

December 18th, 2016 · 47 comments

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool, and like so many other software tools and startups before it, the creators of Basecamp made it for themselves. They just needed a decent way to manage projects and collaborations. It just …

Italy’s Version of Macaroni and Cheese Is Better, Faster and Easier

Over the years, I’ve been working on a system to aggregate data that I publish to other social networks/sites back into my control, on my own WordPress install. Thus far, that has resulted in the creation of Keyring (plugin) to provide an …

Yesterday I went up to Breck with Erika. She went snowboarding, and I tried out my new MSR snowshoes. I started out at the Breck Nordic Center, and hiked for maybe 3 miles or so, before heading back to Peak 8 to meet up for bloody marys and …

Issue № 431

I’m pretty excited to be setting up a brand new website here on my brand new domain, beau.blog. As part of being the company managing the new.blog domain name, we were able to reserve a single domain each, and I grabbed my own name, which I …

This article is by Dave Girouard, CEO of personal finance startup Upstart, and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips …

Please note: This post is the third post in a five part series on the main pricing methodologies, highlighting the pros and cons of each. Check out the first post on cost plus pricing and second post on competitor based pricing.

We all face complex business decisions for which there is no one, correct answer, and yet a strong and occasionally permanent decision is required of us.

A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development: