Articles

Reflections from 27 days and 500 miles across Spain. The overlapping physical, social, cultural, and spiritual layers that make this pilgrimage meaningfully different.

Thoughtful Professional Writing 2025-05-07

Speaking flows at the speed of thought. Writing forces you to organize first. This is hard on you but easy on your reader.

Transactionalism vs Respect 2025-05-05

"Can I ask for your help?" makes me feel like a person who helps people. "I'll pay you back" makes me feel like I'm trading favors. Incentives feel transactional.

Hammers and Nailguns 2025-01-06

A nailgun puts nails into wood. A hammer whacks things. Simple tools with humble opinions are more versatile than specialized ones.

Python Support is Socially Complex 2024-12-09

When a Python workflow fails, most of the work is diagnosing whose fault it is. The ecosystem's distributed ownership means no one has clear responsibility.

Cloud Computing is Broken 2024-12-03

What hunger am I seeing on the ground? Boring shit. People struggle most with the basics of cloud computing. The promise remains undelivered.

Venting and Constructive Communication 2024-10-25

Constructive conversation and venting differ by one question: "Will these words help me achieve my goal?" If no, we're probably venting.

SatCamp Retrospective 2024-10-04

Satellite imagery's potential is incredible, but companies in this space are struggling. An outsider's first impressions from an unconference in Boulder.

How I Almost Quit My Job, and How Being Selfish Saved Me 2024-09-20

When a small amount of your work helps others a great deal, of course you sacrifice. You'd be a monster not to. But your ego can fade in service of your project.

What Does Pangeo 2.0 Look Like? 2024-09-18

In 2018 we unveiled a new architecture for scalable cloud Python. It was great, but also fragile and limited. What comes next?

Usage Based Pricing 2024-09-04

It was good for a while but became a dead end. The pros, cons, and alternatives for capturing value while making customers feel good about paying.

How GitHub taught me to Micromanage 2024-05-11

Open source code review taught me to give intense, detailed feedback. Then I became a manager and learned why that doesn't always translate.

Hiring Sales 2024-04-29

We fired the sales team when our product was bad. Now it's good. Finding the right early sales hire is an interesting challenge.

Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn Comparison 2023-11-10

I pushed the same message to Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon and tracked views and engagement. Reddit won by a mile.

Decision Fatigue 2023-03-18

When you hit a roadblock, don't ask "what should we do?" Own the problem. Propose a solution. Help your team by carrying the weight yourself.

Laser Eye Correction 2023-03-06

From deciding to explore the procedure to having my eyes lasered in two weeks. Long, rambling, and nothing to do with startups or tech.

Performance Reviews 2023-02-14

Give critical feedback from voices other than your own. People are different—treat them differently based on need.

SaaS Go-to-Market 2023-02-01

A snapshot of where Coiled is on product and GTM, written for internal use but useful for other early-stage SaaS companies.

How I Conduct an Interview 2023-01-06

My approach to 45-minute interviews: what I share, what I ask, and how I evaluate candidates. Useful for interviewers or anyone interviewing with me.

Rethinking My Website and Blog 2023-01-02

I felt smarter and happier pre-Twitter. I'm turning back to blogging—optimizing for longer attention spans and mixing evergreen with timely content.

Think for yourself 2022-12-26

In dynamic environments, historical advice often doesn't apply. Imposter syndrome is appropriate—but so is trusting your own thinking.

Audio-Visual Setup 2022-12-18

How we present ourselves has unreasonable effectiveness on perception. An excellent Zoom setup costs $2000 and a day—anyone can achieve the unfair advantage that tall people have naturally.

Meetings 2022-12-02

It made a huge difference. I learned that it's easy to spend energy on routine activities, think "I'm doing my job", and be completely wrong.

Stability Bias 2022-12-02

By not releasing due to regressions, we accept regressions in reverse. By not fixing confusing APIs, we confuse all future users. Stability has hidden costs.

Offsites 2022-09-12

Remote teams accrue alignment debt and interpersonal friction. Offsites rapidly pay down that debt so everyone can go off and work independently again.

Failure 2022-09-05

Someone has to pay the psychological cost of uncertainty. I choose honesty, even when it has negative consequences.

Startup Advice 2022-09-05

Most advice is wrong—not because advisors are dumb, but because their experiences don't transfer. The wisest person for your situation is probably yourself.

User Valued Work 2022-08-24

Developer-valued work is valuable, but only in that it makes us faster at delivering user-valued work. Keep that distinction clear when prioritizing.

Over Grown 2022-08-09

Painful, but we moved faster as a result. More smart people doesn't make you go faster. Often the opposite.

SciPy Mission 2022-08-01

The SciPy community evolved from accelerating science, to enabling data understanding, to now—making people's lives more comfortable. The mission keeps growing.

Revenue 2022-07-25

They care more about valuation than revenue, and only certain kinds of revenue matter. A taxonomy of good and bad revenue from selling open source software.

Small Scope Reviews 2022-03-26

A fast review cycle is incredibly valuable. Distinguish obligatory comments that stop regressions from commendable ones that add enhancements. Better is the enemy of good.

Tech Leads 2021-06-24

Tech leads steer efforts technically using soft power. It's a really fun role. Here are behaviors that make for a good one.

Startup Metrics 2020-10-28

Hockey stick growth and GitHub stars sound great, but the reality is more nuanced. Dask took six years of listening and diligent community service.

Ideal Tweet 2020-08-18

Start with a short single-line hook, then deliver actual novel content. People skim—get to the point immediately.

Short attention span 2020-07-13

Speaking truth is easy. Getting people to listen is hard. Practical advice on respecting your reader through an attention span budget.

Listen to sell 2019-12-05

Resist the urge to answer technical questions. We want to show off how things work, but we often dive too deep before understanding the customer's actual problem.

Senior Engineers 2019-11-09

My criteria for senior engineers: handle vague requirements, seek context, connect with stakeholders, take ownership, communicate regularly, handle uncertainty, and take vacations.

Short Blogposts 2019-06-25

I encourage colleagues to write blogposts frequently. It informs your community, increases visibility, and focuses you on work relevant to others.

Avoid Indirection 2019-06-23

Abstraction has costs. Every layer you add is another place readers have to look. Sometimes the clearest code is the most direct.

Maintainers 2019-05-18

Best practices for open source maintenance: the difference between developers, reviewers, and maintainers, and how to spend your limited time well.

Why I Avoid Slack 2019-02-28

Real-time chat makes everyone feel productive but does little for long-term consensus building. I prefer public, permanent, searchable, cross-referenceable discussions.

Craft Minimal Bug Reports 2018-02-28

Maintainers' willingness to help you for free is optional. Minimal, complete, verifiable examples take 10-30 minutes but dramatically increase your chances of getting help.

Write Dumb Code 2018-01-27

We should write code that novice programmers can understand without explanation. After maintaining code, I think differently about showing off what I know.

Biased Benchmarks 2017-03-09

Fair benchmarks are surprisingly difficult even with best intentions. We judge others by our objectives, fail to use their projects with expertise, and gravitate toward cases where we excel.

Write Tests 2016-02-08

Testing feels like flossing—theoretically important. But if you contribute to long-term software with many collaborators, your tests will outlive your source code several times over.

Dictionaries v. Objects 2013-09-02

The mechanisms we choose to store and share data strongly impact the longevity of the code we write. When do we transition from dicts to custom classes?