Alex Nakamura

Salary is the wrong unit of measurement for engineering talent. The real cost is in what doesn't get built, what breaks, and what slows everyone else down.

The padlock in your browser is widely misunderstood. Here is what it actually guarantees, and what it deliberately leaves out.

The software powering most of the internet was written by people who weren't paid to write it. Here's why that's stranger than it sounds.

SQLite is the most widely deployed database in history. Its creator spent decades making it correct, not fast. That sequence mattered.

The most valuable engineers at high-growth tech companies aren't the ones shipping the most code. They're the ones stopping the wrong code from being written.

The graveyard of acquired-and-abandoned startups looks like corporate waste. It is actually a deliberate strategy, and it works.

When Google led a $300M investment round in Anthropic, it looked like self-sabotage. The logic behind it reveals how large tech companies actually think about existential risk.

Buybacks look like financial engineering. They are, but not in the cynical way most critics assume. The real logic runs deeper.

The most successful apps in history were built around a single action. The pattern is consistent enough to be a design principle, not a coincidence.

The code running your ATM, your flight, and the power grid was written decades ago. That's not a problem. It's the point.

Tech companies don't avoid taxes by accident. Transfer pricing is a deliberate architecture built into how they structure revenue from the start.

Transfer pricing lets multinationals charge their own subsidiaries for intellectual property, shifting billions in taxable income to low-rate jurisdictions. It's legal, widespread, and worth understanding.

SaaS companies don't charge per seat because it's simpler. They do it because it turns their customers into unwitting salespeople.

Apple, Google, and Meta sit at the top of global market caps while owning a fraction of the physical assets of older industrial giants. The accounting explains why.

Every major platform added dark mode within two years of each other. The timing wasn't a coincidence, and user comfort wasn't the reason.

The rules that produced Tr0ub4dor&3 turned out to be worse than the rules they replaced. Here's what the research actually shows.

Loss leaders aren't about being generous. They're about making switching costs so high that leaving becomes practically irrational.

The official story is software complexity. The real story is upgrade cycles, services revenue, and a business model built on obsolescence.