Software is eating the world, sure. But I’m starting to feel like it might be eating the current model of its own development and consumption as well. In the old days, a business added a bunch of software developers to its payroll, and those developers figured out a way to leverage computers to aid the business in its mission. Generally this worked out, since computers are so useful that it’s not that hard to stumble into a useful application, especially for an existing business. (read more)

I’ve recently come into contact with a fairly large django codebase. Django holds a special place in my heart, since it was the first web framework I ever used. At the time it seemed great; it allowed me, someone who didn’t know what an “ajax request” was, to get pretty far pretty quickly. Now that I’ve been doing this stuff professionally for a few years, I have opinions, even though I’m probably still not qualified to. (read more)

What if the predominant method of value creation computers have given us has not been in the form of operational efficiency or newly afforded communication models? Instead, what if it is the ability to economically test business models? Imagine for a moment that computers, and the internet ecosystem more broadly, did not exist. Could any of the big tech success stories that we know today exist in this world, at any scale? (read more)