Posts by Allen Cheung
Review: Arriving Today
In the Prologue chapter of Arriving Today , the author makes an unusual concession: they wrote a long book, and sometimes it can get into technical nitty-gritty that strays a bit far afield from the logistical arc premised by the…
The Tech Down Turn
Layoffs.fyi is the new FuckedCompany.com. It's a crowdsourced tracker of all the layoffs happening in tech. I remember the site first started with the initial COVID lock down: when seemingly overnight, a number of industries—travel,…
Where the Numbers Keep Getting Bigger
I’ve been messing around with the recently released Diablo Immortal. It’s the latest game in the Diablo series, which popularized this Action RPG + loot genre of games that has largely displaced MMORPGs, by replacing monthly subscription fees with…
Wither Offices in 2022?
As I'm typing this out in June of 2022, it's been 2.5 years since the original COVID-19 virus strain was first found in humans—though it certainly has felt longer than 30 months. The…
Do Subscriptions Work for Video Games?
Video games are a hit-driven business. While there are certainly a class of games— Fortnite , Counter-strike , League of Legends —that persist for years and even decades, the vast majority of video games go through a development → launch → content/…
The Politics of Management
Early on as an engineering manager, I made one of those rookie mistakes that seems obvious in retrospect, but in the moment was absolutely confounding. I had heard about another team needing some help with building a landing site for…
