Markdown That You Might Not Know
I write every one of my blog posts in Markdown.
9/17/22, 6:55 PM
Web Development
I made a daily web game
It seems like simple daily web games, à la Wordle or Framed, have been quite popular over the pandemic.
9/11/22, 12:25 PM
Web Development
Switching to Webmention Comments
A while back I introduced likes to the blog through the use of Webmentions and Bridgy.
8/25/22, 3:39 PM
Web Development
Improving Twitter Embeds using the Twitter API
For a long time now, I've been frustrated by how slow the official twitter embed is.
8/8/22, 5:30 AM
Web Development
Type Guards in Typescript
Often times when I speak to developers who have just started writing typescript, they have begun to understand static typing.
7/29/22, 6:51 AM
Web Development
σ-driven project management: when is the optimal time to give up?
Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think, which is a blog post I wrote a long time ago positing that software projects completion time follow a log-normal distribution.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
4/5/22, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled
Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically leasing capacity in their data centers through an API. Other pure-software providers will build all the stuff on top of it.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
11/30/21, 12:00 AM
Web Development
What is the right level of specialization? For data teams and anyone else.
This isn't as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day: I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different roles (data scientist, data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer etc) is generally a bad thing driven by the fact that tools are bad and too hard to...
From: Erik Bernhardsson
7/23/21, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story
I guess I should really call this a parable. The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (~4 people) at a mid-stage startup (~$10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
7/7/21, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Software infrastructure 2.0: a wishlist
Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year! I love working with something that moves so quickly.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
4/19/21, 12:00 AM
Web Development
What's Erik up to?
I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years, I ran the tech team, hiring 300+ people, probably doing 2,000+ interviews, and according to GitHub I added 646,941 lines of code and removed 339,164.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
4/1/21, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory
It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
12/16/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Developer experience as a competitive advantage
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and tooling.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
10/6/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Mortality statistics and Sweden's "dry tinder" effect
We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”. But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I thought was interesting and wanted to see if I could replicated it through data.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
9/23/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
How to set compensation using commonsense principles
Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
6/8/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
3/10/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model
Let's consider a toy model where you're hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It's not very important what those are, so let's just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
1/13/20, 12:00 AM
Web Development
What can startups learn from Koch Industries?
I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn't my first interest in Koch—I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple of years ago. Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world's largest ones.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
12/19/19, 12:00 AM
Web Development
We're hiring at Better
Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
12/9/19, 12:00 AM
Web Development
Buffet lines are terrible, but let's try to improve them using computer simulations
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I've suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I'm stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
10/16/19, 12:00 AM
Web Development