Latest posts
- What about “Nothing about us without us?”Dec 08, 2025
As I was drafting my last piece on Friday, “They have to be able to talk about us without us”, my thoughts of course went to one of the most famous slogans of the disability rights movement, “Nothing about us without us.” I wasn’t unaware that there were similarities in the phrasing of what I wrote. But I think the topic of communicating effectively to groups, as I wrote about the other day, and e
- How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?Jan 05, 2026
The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?” There have been mass layoffs that leave more tech workers than ever looking for new roles in the worst market we’ve ever seen. Many of the most talented, thoughtful and experienced people in the indu
- 500,000 tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was releasedJan 06, 2026
One of the key points I repeated when talking about the state of the tech industry yesterday was the salient fact that half a million tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Now, to be clear, those workers haven’t been laid off because their jobs are now being done by AI, and they’ve been replaced by bots. Instead, they’ve been laid off by execs who now have AI to
- How Markdown took over the worldJan 09, 2026
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Goog
- How to know if that job will crush your soulJan 12, 2026
Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush
- Wikipedia at 25: What the web can beJan 15, 2026
When Wikipedia launched 25 years ago today, I heard about it almost immediately, because the Internet was small back then, and I thought “Well… good luck to those guys.” Because there had been online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, and anybody who really cared about this stuff would, of course, buy Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, right? I’d been fascinated by the technology of wikis for a good while
- Codeless: From idea to softwareJan 22, 2026
Something actually new? There’s finally been a big leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI — not just “it’s doing some work for me”, but “we couldn’t do this before”. What’s new are a few smart systems that let coders control fleets of dozens of coding bots, all working in tandem, to swarm over a list of tasks and to deliver entire features, or even entire sets of features, just from a plain-En
- Why We SpeakJan 26, 2026
I've been working in and around the technology industry for a long time. Depending on how you count, it's 20 or 30 years. (I first started getting paid to put together PCs with a screwdriver when I was a teenager, but there isn't a good way to list that on LinkedIn.) And as soon as I felt like I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to pay the next month's rent without having to eat ramen no
- A Codeless Ecosystem, or hacking beyond vibe codingJan 27, 2026
There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially extraordinary, as outlined in that first set of notes about what we could call "codeless" software. But now it's worth looking
- New York Tech at 30: the CrossroadsFeb 04, 2026
This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typica
- There's no such thing as "tech" (Ten years later)Feb 06, 2026
Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever. There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in
- Coding agents as the new compilersFeb 12, 2026
In each successive generation of code creation thus far, we’ve abstracted away the prior generation over time. Usually, only a small percentage of coders still work on the lower layers of the stack that used to be the space where everyone was working. I’ve been coding long enough that people were still creating code in assembly when I started (though I was never any good at it!), though I started