There is a near constant background-level conversation in the engineering world about which kinds of tests are better; unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and so on. A while back, I decided I was only going to write one kind of test. I’m not really sure it neatly fits into…

While I was at PayPal, I did a metric ton of interviews, and I heard interview feedback from a bunch of different colleagues and friends. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and I’ve seen others make some obvious blunders too. Now I’m building OneText, and I can finally start hiring on…

Growing up I found myself instilled with the strong impression that things were supposed to be difficult, and that when I was older I would need to keep doing really difficult things to be successful in life. In school, you’re not really taught to learn in an incremental way, and…

Since co-founding OneText earlier this year, I’ve been personally working with a metric ton of DTC and eCommerce brands. It’s been fascinating getting to know these guys. It’s the actual wild west: everyone has a slightly dubious playbook, a ton of hustle, a handful of mentors, and a Shopify store…

Everything these days is a subscription. And honestly, on reflection, subscriptions are complete horseshit. I mean — paying for a monthly service is not a bad thing per se. It makes a decent amount of sense when it’s an actual on-demand service you’re paying to access, like Netflix or Spotify…

I mean, how hard can it be? Aim Twilio at a phone number and turn it on. Hol’ up Yeah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A bunch of different brands have started to use SMS to communicate with their customers. The only problem is, they all decided to do it like…

Messaging is finicky. There are many scenarios where it’s necessary to asynchronously send messages between two different layers. For example: Between different threads or processes Between different iframes or windows Between a web page and a web-worker or service-worker Between a client application and a server, via a web-socket Basic Fire-and-Forget Serialized Messages In…

A short counter of Taleb’s Bitcoin analysis. Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently published his latest draft of Bitcoin, Currencies, and Bubbles: Bitcoin, Currencies, and Bubbles This discussion applies quantitative finance methods and economic arguments to cryptocurrencies in general and bitcoin…www.academia.edu This article is not intended to be a complete counter-thesis, nor do I believe that all of Taleb’s arguments are incorrect. But I do aim to refute or counter a…

When you create an asset that appreciates in price exponentially for a whole decade, you’re going to have plenty of charlatans, no small amount of bullshit, and swathes of market hysteria, all of which you need to cut through. Bitcoin is no exception. It can be frustrating as a Bitcoin…