Software keeps swinging between bundling and unbundling, and people usually explain each swing after the fact with a story about vision. But I think the real driver is duller than that. It's the cost of running several tools that have to talk to each other. When that cost
We've been using Claude Code at SparkLoop for a while now. And honestly, the thing that made the biggest difference wasn't a better model or a cleverer prompt. It was something we started doing before we even adopted AI coding tools. We wrote wiki articles. The
At first, I was very skeptical. I came across OpenClaw (then called ClawdBot, and renamed twice since) on Twitter, but to me it felt like yet another internet fad. Why would I need to ask questions via Telegram when I could just open ChatGPT? What's the leap forward
Once your app hits a certain scale—hundreds of millions or even billions of records—handling analytics and reporting becomes a completely different beast. We felt this acutely last year at SparkLoop. Our platform had grown to store hundreds of millions of events just as we introduced an "Advanced
Every year, usually around the end of November or early December, I spend a couple of days in a remote location. No technology, no particular comforts. Just myself, my dog, and the silence of nature I try to fast for the whole duration of the retreat, though it depends on
I recently migrated our Redis instance from RedisCloud to StackHero. I’d heard good things about StackHero for years, and the fact that we could cut our costs by 90% was the final push. To be honest, I was dreading it. Switching Redis providers meant I had to: * Move Sidekiq
I once heard a story about a nine-year-old boy from a hunter-gatherer group who got lost in the forest and survived for a month. He knew which plants to eat, how to find water, how to stay warm, how to avoid predators. None of this was unusual.
Two hundred years ago, polling every citizen on every issue was impossible. Horses and paper ballots don’t scale. So we invented representatives. A clever hack for its time. Bit that constraint no longer exists. With modern technology you could poll millions of people instantly. Not once every four years,
The UK government recently forced Apple to weaken iCloud encryption. That was the final push I needed to get my files off iCloud and onto a server I control. I’d been thinking about it for years, ever since reading horror stories of people being locked out of their accounts
The best, yet strange, year of my life so far.
What is it like to sell a business? And more importantly, what now?
The good, the bad and the ugly of the first year of SparkLoop.
Recap of my reading year and some book recommendations.
Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.
Don't fight your natural productive rythm. Embrace it.