Marcus Webb

First movers get the glory in startup mythology. Second movers get the market share. Here's why the pattern holds, and what it means for founders.

Tony Hoare called null his billion-dollar mistake in 2009. Sixty years later, the industry knows better and keeps doing it anyway.

A VPN encrypts your traffic but leaves one critical channel exposed. Your DNS resolver has been quietly building a profile of everything you do online.

The trade-off between latency and throughput is real but routinely misunderstood. Most systems aren't hitting the constraint developers think they are.

A record-breaking quarter can quietly become a company's biggest obstacle. Here's the mechanism, told through Basecamp's growth story.

The story of Ethernet's collision problem, how CSMA/CD solved it, and why the solution matters more than the problem ever did.

Salary is the starting point, not the answer. The true cost of a developer hour includes a long list of line items most engineering managers never total up.

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

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.

Time seems like the simplest thing a computer tracks. Google Spanner showed why it's actually the hardest, and what it took to get it right.

Counterintuitive but consistent: higher API prices often attract more serious buyers, reduce support burden, and improve retention. Here's the mechanism behind each.

The salary number on an offer letter is the least important variable in engineering economics. Most companies never learn this until the damage is done.

When HashiCorp flipped Terraform to a non-compete license in 2023, it revealed a structural problem the industry has been ignoring for decades.

Staging exists to catch bugs before production. It mostly catches the bugs that would never reach production anyway.

The acquisition offer isn't always about ownership. Sometimes it's about neutralization. The economics of competitive suppression explain more tech history than most people realize.

Burn rate tells you what a founder believes about the future. Here is how to read the signal correctly.

Clicking Send feels instant. The journey from user action to transmitted packet involves more coordinated machinery than most programmers ever stop to consider.