Dispensing with all niceties, let’s get straight to the point: hiring the wrong person can be a disaster.

I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade.

I’ve built products used by millions. I’ve led teams, mentored junior engineers, scaled startups, grown insane databases. It used to be exciting. Now, I’m not so sure.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this - I think perhaps it’s cropped up in my mind a few times over the past decade.

Some of the best B2B SaaS products I’ve used started out as great consumer tools. I have found that if somebody has a tool they can’t live without, they’ll advocate for it within their workplace. And let’s be real—people love nice things, especially when they’re free.

I’ve been using CleanShot for a bit over five years. I have no complaints except that it’s attached to my SetApp subscription, something that I was fine paying for until some of my favorite apps left the service. I essentially now only use Lungo, TablePlus and CleanShot X – the first two of which I now have one-off licenses for.

I’ve been dragged back into Jira after five years of bliss with Linear, and it’s rough.

Recently talking with a company that needs to provide real-time collaboration within their application, I started to think about the problem. Operational transformation (OT) and conflict-free replicates data types (CRDTs) are solutions to this problem.

I often see developers merging main into their feature branches and opening pull requests (PRs) that include commits from other branches. This practice leads to “git spaghetti,” which has several consequences:

Jamie AI is a project I embarked on to build a human-like virtual assistant that I could CC on emails to take care of my admin. I originally intended very much to open source this, but I’ve decided to make it into a product.

Sharing large amounts of data over short-form mediums like QR codes or NFC tags can be challenging. The data needs to be encrypted to ensure confidentiality, but packing useful data into a small space is difficult.