Alex Nakamura

Amazon's most productive engineers sometimes don't write code at all. The logic is counterintuitive but the economics are clear.

Overcast built a loyal audience with a free app and nearly went broke serving it. The math behind free is stranger than most founders expect.

Acqui-hires look like talent deals. But what companies are really buying is far more fragile than any contract reveals.

Your profiler says the code is fast. Your users say it feels slow. Both are telling the truth. Here is why that gap exists and how one team closed it.

A startup picked the middle storage tier to save money. Two years later, they'd spent three times what premium storage would have cost. Here's the math.

Your code is full of names, intentions, and structure that vanish before a single instruction runs. Understanding what survives compilation changes how you write software.

A single developer's burnout nearly broke a piece of infrastructure that half the internet depends on. The economics behind that story are worse than you think.

Encrypted messaging feels instant. The underlying process involves several distinct security operations, each solving a different problem. Here's what actually runs.

The problem isn't that companies ignore cloud costs. It's that the structure of cloud pricing is designed to make accurate forecasting nearly impossible.

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

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.