Only 9% of small businesses reach $1 million or more in revenue.

You've just raised your first money. Engineering now has to go quicker, professionalise, plan further ahead and keep today's customers happy, all at once, often with a founding engineer holding the…

i got removed from my main work project this week. my supervisor called me apropos of nothing in the middle of the day (always scary) and said that the client is renegotiating their contract for next…

The most important change an engineer can make isn't a new language or framework — it's a single sentence about what they think they're doing. 'I am writing code' makes the diff the deliverable and…

96 days of applying, 106 distinct roles, 112 hiring tracks, one Principal offer, and 104 tracks that never produced a conclusive answer. What my reconstructed 2026 job search says about hiring after…

Every MVP has an event horizon: the point where people start depending on it. You won't feel yourself cross it - you'll find out when you try to back out.

Your job post for a ‘data person’ describes three jobs. Whoever takes it will burn out doing all three. I read a lot of these. Build and maintain pipelines. Own the data model. Create…

do-it-yourself product management therapy

Back in 2022, I quoted from an interesting post by Ben Schlappig at One Mile at a Time, where he wrote : I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few senior airline executives over the…

Part of What Growth Takes · The Greenbox Story Fiction. The company and its numbers are invented; the technique is not. Perth is optimising the subscription experience. Melbourne is building a B2B…

Contents Copying what you can see is a rational move, and it fails anyway The incentives reward adoption, not results A case: eighteen months of visible activity, and nothing underneath The…

I've seen a pretty big uptick in sales on the Mac App Store since I temporarily dropped the price from $9.99 to $4.99 for that 512 Pixels ad campaign, which has me thinking about software pricing in…

SOC Tier 1 shift start and handover review: practical checklist for open incidents, ticket ownership, priorities, next actions, and escalation.

As I am certain you all know by now, especially if you're a Notorious ROB reader, Compass has filed its lawsuit against CRMLS in California. Seems that everyone knew it was coming, what with…

My former colleague Hadi Hariri has recommended this book to me a long time ago. He left JetBrains last month, so I decided it is a good time to finally write a review. The book has been on my table…

In a comment in response to my recent post about A.I. in code development, J. Peterson made a very trenchant observation: Software developers used to reach out to each other for coding advice. Now we…

Don Valentine founded Sequoia Capital in 1972. He backed companies such as Apple and Cisco, recruited and taught legendary Investors such as Michael Moritz and Doug Leone, and helped build a Venture…

Elizabeth Holmes’s Netflix documentary “You Can See Everything” was a huge box office success during its limited release: Still, it is Nathan Fielder’s confounding documentary on Elizabeth Holmes,…

There are only two types of startups now: 1) lifestyle and 2) sci-fi. Lifestyle startups should bootstrap. Sci-fi startups should raise lots of capital. Anything in the middle is what...

Recently at Nordhealth we embarked on a re-skin of our entire application: a visual uplift of the whole product to bring it into 2026. These kinds of changes have a big blast radius and are…

I started this blog a few years ago when I began my journey studying immunology, to have a place to write about what I was learning and about applications of AI to the field. My studies were a…

A clear explanation of how AI changes team structure, management roles, and internal coordination. Teams built around AI are removing functional silos and giving individual contributors much higher…

This blog runs on reader subscriptions and donations. Reading it is free, and always will be, but it does take money to run the site and keep myself fed and sheltered. Every year (except one time…

I often say free advice is worth what you pay for it, but after extensive experience in a brutal job market during the Great Recession, I found a few tips that helped me get through it. A lot of…

I missed our meet up on the 7th October as I was ill. Thanks very much to Tristan for taking some notes. Here’s some of what was talked about: Looking for new job How to write AI skills on a CV…

Request to Tech Leads to teach Juniors the fundamentals now more than ever. I’ve seen a disturbing trend where Juniors and mid-level devs are using LLM’s to generate PR’s where they…

How I built Felix for venue and equipment enquiries: guided questions, catalogue matching, indicative pricing and manager handoff across a Telegram bot and Mini App.

With untold millions of sales professionals in the world, sellers play a role in any economy. As the intermediary between clients and providers, sales can be a spiritual practice, with sellers…

    When Nick Wray was our creative director he got an all-girl student team in on placement for two weeks. I don’t normally do that, I never expect much from student teams. But Nick was…

Imagine you're a senior developer working on an account-management service. You ask a coding agent to add audit logging when users change their account details. It has access to the repository, you…

Most small businesses default to full-time hires, but with rising employment costs, that's often the most expensive choice. Compare three staffing models to match the work you actually need done.

In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with CT Smith about her new book, WTFM: A Practical Guide for Standing Up Docs at a Startup. We discuss why docs need a human owner even…

Law 41 was about the person you replace. Law 42 of the 48 Laws of Power, Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep Will Scatter, is about the person on your team you would most like to see gone.

Hands-on software architect who has run a custom development and R&D consultancy since 2009, and shipped secure, high-reliability systems for 30+ years before and alongside it. Takes client work…

A discussion about how to use technology — and AI in particular — more strategically.

In 2011 the Federal Court held that a director's reading of the accounts cannot be handed to anyone else. Nine in ten directors now use AI for board work, and the obvious use hands the reading to a…

Eleventh episode of the AI & Docs podcast series is up! In this one, Tom and I talk with CT Smith (Docs Goblin) about her book WTFM: A Practical Guide for Standing Up Docs at a Startup, a short,…

“Probably the best ethics talk I’ve ever heard” – AOTB Moderator The talk I gave at Agile on the Beach this summer was one of the most personal and difficult talks I’ve given…

I've quit several companies, and every time, I had the same conversation first. I’d go to the CEO with three to five issues people wanted addressed. I built that list by living in the company and…

I’m not a fan of algorithmic tests as a first-line screening tool. As someone who didn’t study computer science and never made a point of memorising algorithms, I’ve always felt…

India has become central to how international professional services firms deliver their engagements, while their Indian member firms have grown into substantial businesses serving domestic companies,…

It’s true, anyone can lead. In twenty years I’ve watched people grow into leaders, helped a few get there, and grown into the role myself. How far each of us got depended on the trust, backing and…

Doing something for 10,000 hours doesn’t make you an expert. This post looks at what deliberate practice really means, and how Scrum and other Agile approaches can help teams keep improving.

I built a system that writes scoped business plans and produced ten of them before dinner. The shortlist I made afterwards was the wrong output. What I should have written instead was a kill rule.

Moxie Marlinspike, a dreadlocked squatter who sailed a $1,000 wreck to the Caribbean with bags of bricks for anchors, built Signal and the encryption guarding billions of WhatsApp and Messenger…

An agent on your laptop is yours. An agent in the channel is the team's. How Polygon's non-engineers ship code without opening an IDE, and what it took to get there.

Towards the end of my time at Accenture, I was the project manager on a launch for a large computer maker. They were starting a services offering for small and medium businesses, built on top of the…

On job security, institutional knowledge and the unexpected downside of becoming the person everyone depends on.

🦸 Community Superhero Our community superhero this week is Eyal Estrin, VP of Cybersecurity at JPMorganChase. Eyal is a prolific writer, having published two books on cloud security and dozens of…

I found this to be a level-headed take on the whole "SaaS is dead" debacle that has been floating through our community, and the world in general. I LOL'ed…