Open Source Maintainers Build the Web and Earn Almost Nothing

When a SaaS company collapses, the founders move on. The customers are left holding broken software, locked data, and no good options.

Lines of code is the worst metric in software economics. Here's what actually predicts whether an engineer makes your team faster or slower.

A software team cut notifications by 80% and got worse. The problem was never the interruption. It was what happened in the 23 minutes after.

A mid-sized consultancy tracked where its knowledge workers actually lost time. The answer wasn't meetings or multitasking. It was refinding things they'd already found.

The meeting-vs-document problem isn't a calendar issue. It's a thinking issue, and the meeting is how you avoid doing the hard part.

Being first is overrated. The companies that dominate markets are rarely the ones that invented them. Founders just can't admit that.

Zenefits hired like a 5,000-person company when it had 500 employees. The wreckage was instructive.

Stripe's early growth nearly destroyed the company. The lesson isn't about bad customers. It's about what happens when you say yes to everyone.

Async code reduces wait time and increases cognitive load at the same time. That tradeoff is structural, not accidental.

Vector databases don't store meaning. They store geometry. Understanding the difference changes how you build with them.

The concept of 'done' in software is a convenient fiction. Here's why that's not a problem to solve, but a reality to design around.

The skills behind effective prompt engineering aren't new. We've been doing this work for decades under different names.

Adding features feels like progress. Removing them is where the real engineering work happens, and most teams never do it.

Your compiler doesn't just translate code into machine instructions. It rewrites your program, often substantially, before a single instruction runs.

The famous table of hardware latency numbers circulating in engineering culture was calibrated for 2012 hardware. The gaps have widened significantly since.

Founders fixate on zero marginal cost as the magic of software. But the cost of acquiring, convincing, and keeping customers doesn't scale the same way the product does.

Acqui-hires are sold to employees as soft landings. For founders and investors, sometimes they are. For everyone else, the math is brutal.

High prices aren't a growth obstacle. For B2B software, they're often the engine. Here's why the math works the way it does.