The App Store is a problem.
As bought into the Apple ecosystem as I am - to be clear, its devices and operating systems are by far the best I've ever used - the way it polices its software ecosystem has become a barrier to innovation.
I don't really care about Fortnight, ...
August 29, 2020
I'm looking for an entrepreneurial front-end engineer to help with our work at ForUsAll. Our mission is to help all Americans build a brighter financial future, a click at a time.
We heavily use React, Redux, and supporting packages like Storybook, Jest, and Styled Components. We're beginning to use more Node ...
August 28, 2020
I've been writing at least a post a day during my short social media hiatus. Although I'm a little bit worried about flooding the folks who subscribe via email - it's occurred to me to limit the mailing list to a couple of days a week and send as a ...
August 28, 2020
Kevin Roose has written an alarming wakeup call in the New York Times:
Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.
While election polls typically ...
August 28, 2020
While the pandemic certainly accelerated it, the housing crisis in America has been, in large part, the result of interest rates being held at zero for years.
I'm far from an economist, but here's my attempt to explain the process:
Low interest rates encourage speculation. It's essentially Santa Claus for investors: loans ...
August 27, 2020
In the US, you normally have to be an accredited investor to invest in private companies like startups. In practice, this has meant that you've needed to earn $200K a year for the last two years running, or have a net worth of at least a million dollars excluding the ...
August 26, 2020
I used to have a simple ethical stance that influenced my career choices: I wouldn't work for a defense or arms company, and I wouldn't work for a bank.
In both cases, the idea was that I didn't want my work to result in someone's death. For defense or weapons, the ...
August 26, 2020
We're in the mist of what may be the largest civil rights movement in US history. In Belarus, inspiring protests are bringing down the authoritarian Aleksandr Lukashenko. Around the world, authoritarians and nationalists are being met with a rise in democratic political protests.
The US government has sometimes not lived up ...
August 25, 2020
I've decided to take a short hiatus from social media - which, really, is a hiatus from learning about the world in staccato, where each dopamine hit brings a payload of horror. I want to be informed, but I want to be informed on my schedule.
I'm writing this update from ...
August 24, 2020
Firefox matters. The other major browsers are all subject to a larger corporation's business interests: Safari is built in the context of the App Store, Chrome must support Google's ad targeting business, and Edge fills a gap in the Windows ecosystem. But Firefox is here to fight for the users: ...
August 17, 2020
I've been worrying a lot about the United States Postal Service. This week we've seen sorting machines removed from post offices; post boxes removed from Democratic-leaning areas of Republican-run states; and the President of the United States openly admit he wants to defund the service in order to put postal ...
August 15, 2020
As a kid, when I thought about the future, becoming a software developer was not what immediately came to mind. I loved technology - I learned to write in BASIC at the same time as English - but it was always at its best when it was in service of ...
August 10, 2020
I'm trying something new. At this point I've got hundreds of people signed up to receive these posts via my mailing list, in addition to folks who are subscribed via various feed readers or on social media. This is a little bit too close to a braodcast strategy for my ...
August 8, 2020
Every so often, I'm asked to look over a startup pitch deck. I'm no longer investing, but if I have bandwidth and I think the elevator pitch is interesting, I'm happy to provide advice.The team slide is, of course, the most important part of any pitch, because the people in ...
August 4, 2020
This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for July.
A few people have asked about my process. I save my interesting links into Pocket, which is integrated into Firefox, my browser of choice. (I trust Mozilla to look after me ...
August 1, 2020