I ran into this error for the first time: You may run into the more obscure error: I had to look it up to understand what a pty device was (basically, a terminal connection)! The default on macOS was ~500, so I had to really be convinced that I had 500 pty terminals running, but it looked like I did (coding CLIs spawn their own subshells, vscode at the time used a bash wrapper to spawn a zsh tmux session, etc)…
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I spent years of my life building an advanced NetSuite Connector. It got acquired by Stripe and has now been absorbed into their connector offerings. While at Stripe, I led the buildout of the Stripe Billing to Salesforce CPQ connector. Point being, I know both NetSuite and SalesForce really well. I’ve been asked by many startups over the years I’ve consulted with on various NetSuite products why NetSuite continues to be the market leader. I’m building in a completely different space now (health tech), but I was recently asked this question again and figured I’d drop my thoughts in a blog post for posterity. Here’s my take on why NetSuite and SalesForce continue to dominate and why it’s hard-to-impossible for startups to disrupt them. 1…
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I published the first part of this blog a while back, and wrote most of this post around the same time. I just found some time to clean this up and publish it. I was surprised I still agreed with most of my thinking nearly a year later. AI Will Cause Rapid Job Loss The most concerning impact Artificial Intelligence will have on society is job displacement. Yes, every technological revolution in the past has threatened job security. Yet, there have always been more than enough jobs. Especially in the current age, we can’t find enough workers to do the jobs that we need done as a society. Although history is against me, I do believe that AI will displace jobs in a way that is truly different than previous technology revolutions…
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Git worktrees are a lesser-known feature of git that only really became useful as CLI coding tools became really popular. They enable "duplicates" of a git project to exist on your file system that share the same .git database. This enables stashes, branches, etc to be shared across all worktrees. Since the folders + files are duplicated, this enables you to have different test environments, databases, env config, etc so multiple coding agent sessions can be run in parallel. However, switching between and creating git worktrees is a pain. The syntax is cumbersome, there are no great CLI completions, and it’s not supported within tools like forgit…
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Common wisdom in startups is "ideas are easy, execution is everything" The idea being, if someone else can execute an idea better than I can—just by me telling them about it—I shouldn’t work on it! I still think this is true, but now ideas (at least, big ones) are much harder to come by. Simple ideas are easy. "Uber for dog walking," "Airbnb for cars," "vetcove for industrial materials," etc. If you can explain the idea in one sentence, sure, the idea doesn’t matter. It’s all about the execution. Years ago, there were many ideas like this. The mobile + cloud platform shifts were playing out, and there were numerous "obvious" businesses to be built…
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I’ve been fighting my cholesterol for a couple of years at this point. This past summer, I lived in Italy for two months, ate whatever I wanted, and my cholesterol dropped by nearly 50% and my HA1C didn’t change. Below is the full story! Background Why even track your cholesterol and HA1C levels? After I was diagnosed with methane-dominant SIBO (confirmed by FoodMarble) in my early 30s, I was motivated to find the root cause. I started paying attention to my bloodwork and discovered I had high cholesterol. Not only was it possible that these were tied to SIBO, but I learned that these elevated levels, if not reduced, could cause many more health issues down the line. That was just enough incentive for me to start owning my health data…
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As part of setting up my new home server, I decided to learn Caddy. Caddy is a replacement for nginx/apache. With its plugin system, zero-config SSL support, and modern architecture, it’s a good bit more powerful. It’s been a while since I’ve used something that just felt right: well-designed, great abstractions, good defaults, etc. I’m really impressed with what they’ve built. It’s a beautiful piece of software with well-written documentation. It’s pretty easy to use, but I ran into some sharp edges and wanted to share my experience and my example Caddyfile. Caddy Features It’s designed for local development and production usage…
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Introduction I’m in the midst of hunting for the next startup idea, and I’ve been thinking about and playing around with AI nearly every day over the last year. I’ve had a lot of conversations with fellow technologists about how the advances in AI are going to change our world, and I wanted to get some of them down on paper. I’d love to hear critiques and comments on any of these thoughts! I’m still revising my thinking here and would love to hear different points of view. How Will AI Improve? It’s impossible to predict exactly how things will play out, but it’s important to at least define a point of view and think about the categories where AI may or may not improve: Cost. Undoubtedly, inference costs will drop…
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Time is the great leveler. Regardless of where you live, what job you have, how much money you have, or what culture you live in, you have 24 hours in a day. We have a responsibility to cultivate our resources. At the very top of this list is our time. We live in an age when our time is more limited than ever. From big companies (Instagram, Twitter, etc.) to our friends (messaging us all day), every aspect of our culture nibbles away at any minute of spare time that we have. Managing our time well is more important than ever and is a crucial aspect of being a wholesome and effective person. Here’s what we want to accomplish by managing our time well: Integrity. We want to do what we say we will do without being reminded. Clear Priorities…
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Tmux has been one of the best things I’ve added to my developer toolkit. After my initial dive into tmux, I’ve slowly learned more about the system and made some additional improvements to my workflow. Some notes from my tmux learnings over the last couple years: It’s been great that tmux continues to get consistent updates. Mad props to the developer who has maintained this tool for quite a long time without too much funding. In recent versions of tmux, you don’t need reattach-to-user-namespace but you do need to remap default keybindings to use pbcopy. From my research, it wasn’t clear that you still needed to modify your config to use pbcopy, but you definitely do…
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