Book Reviews
An Era Hostile to Innovation
140 characters instead of flying cars. Peter Thiel quipped this back in 2011, succinctly and pointedly describing the state of technological progress in the 21st century. It’s damning our modern tendencies to seek incremental improvements over grandiose new ideas,…
You Don’t Deserve a House in the Bay Area
Time to check-in on the Bay Area housing crisis in 2016. ... Yep, still as bad as ever. The latest controversy is that, contrary to silly ideas back in 2015 that two working professionals could afford to own a home…
The Folly of Stack Ranking and Measuring Impact
Recently I came across a brief statement on Facebook about the well-explained evils of stack ranking, with a half-hearted Devil’s Advocate argument about how impact can absolutely be an objective metric, measured and ranked[1]. I still…
Effective Communication Requires Traffic Engineering
Solving communication with clever tooling is akin to buying into a get-rich-quick scheme. I’d like to think most of us recognize that good communication in itself is hard , but I do think a lot of us want…
A Fancy European Road Trip
My wife and I just got back from a week-long vacation in picturesque Scandinavia. To be honest, it was not one of the destinations either of us ever had on our list of places to list, especially during the…
Data Sync Not Invented Here
You’d think that data syncing is a solved problem for applications. Dropbox has been around for close to 10 years , and they came up with a product model — a local folder whose files (usually) silently merge with upstream servers…
