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19 September
Technologist and entrepreneur; former CTO of Threadless and chief technology officer of the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
Disconcerting genre shift If you sit down to watch a documentary and realize, about ten minutes in, that it’s actually a feature film, everything about it feels off until you shift into a different mode. Walk into a new doctor’s office, and it m…
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Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
The coolest part: roboclaw runs our team server, is live on Discord, talks with gpt-live and knows about all the sessions it's juggling. We can ask it about context to current and past sessions right while we have meetings. Related
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Their words
In effect, what I am demonstrating is that CPUs are not boring. They are improving fast.
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lemire.me
18 September
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
Analyst of the business of technology; writes Asymco on Apple, disruption and, latterly, micromobility.
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
17 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
One of Michael Moritz's best stories on obsession is about the ride he got from Bill Gates when Microsoft was still private. "Bill Gates gave me a ride to the airport in his car. The radio was missing in the car, a big, gaping hole in the dashboard. I said, Bill, what happened to you, did you get ripped off? And he said no, I had it taken out. Why'd you have it taken out? Well, I drive from my home to the office, which is 7 minutes and 32 seconds, and then I'll drive from the office to the airport, which is however long. And he said if I've got the radio, I'm afraid that I'll switch it on and… Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' es… Related
16 September
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
The view from the Datadog office is pretty epic in NYC Related
Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.
he vibe coded the recording tool as i sat next to him at the vienna office. sometimes it's alright to have the ceo vibe slop his way to success. Quoting @colindaymond Radius lets you work with and collaborate on artifacts, natively within Pi Related
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
I did office hours today with a founder who had so many different things to figure out that we walked for 5 miles. (These were mostly the good kind of problem. He's in the early stage, where problems ≈ deciding what to do in what order.) Related
14 September
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
there is this weird fixation with hanging out with other similarly successful people. Nothing could be more boring to hang out with people so narrowly obsessed with a small sliver of life. Related
13 September
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
You could earn more by quitting your boring job at a big corp and start going after bug bounties with higher rewards using a good harness from the same company Related
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
When does it become a speech? One person isn’t a lecture, it’s lunch. Three people is office hours. Six people is a seminar. At some point, we shift from interaction to performance–but the people are the same people, the very ones that were happy to…
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Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
12 September
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
The daily review The office worker has learned to dread the annual review. For many good reasons. It’s going away. Now, like workers on the factory floor, it’s likely that the metrics will be exposed and the system will be contributing…
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11 September
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.
Their words
They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc.
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@tobi on X x.com
9 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
The reason that is rarely articulated, for obvious reasons, but which is nonetheless true: for many this fills a void of meaning. They get be one of the decisive few at the decisive moment in the history of life. Very similar to the emotions that motivated many revolutionaries of days past. All of the sudden the small things one does—the books one reads, one’s office set up, one’s bedtime routine—take on an awful cosmic significance. The whole history of carbon life is culminating with *me* — and what I do, and the few elect here with me, matters, and matters immensely. We are the agents of h… Quoting @jasminewsun I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immort… Related
8 September
Developer, author and YouTuber covering Raspberry Pi, homelab hardware and Ansible automation. Author of Ansible for DevOps.
Writer of Lenny's Newsletter and host of Lenny's Podcast, covering product, growth and career in tech. Previously a product lead at Airbnb. Also an angel investor and advisor.
Grok @Bot is the hottest new AI product in the world right now. I'm absolutely hooked. It all started a few months ago as a tiny team holed up in a separate part of the office, building from scratch. Four weeks after the first line of code, the whole company was obsessed. Three weeks later, it launched to the world. Less than a month in, millions of Grok Bots are already helping people get work done. Roman Ugarte (@romanugarte_) incubated, launched, and now leads product for Grok Bot. This is the first time he's told the story: 🔸 Why they started fresh instead of building it into Cursor 🔸 T… Related
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
Honored to have the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, help us open Replit’s first international office in London! I’ve really appreciated the Mayor’s approach to AI, it feels very similar to ours. He calls himself an AI realist: clear-eyed about the disruption AI will create, but optimistic about the impact if we give people the tools and skills to participate in the coming revolution. That’s exactly how we think about it at Replit. AI is going to transform work, so we have to make sure far more people can use it to create, build businesses, and access new opportunities. It’s also why, as we estab… Quoting @MayorofLondon London shares Replit’s vision of a world where everyone can benefit from the opportunities of the AI age. I was delighted to open their first international office in King's Cross. It speaks to the extraordinary optimism coming from every corner of our capital’s booming tech sector. Related
7 September
British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.
7sep26 Right, then. Autumn’s here, and I’m shifting gears. Massively simplifying, going analogue wherever possible, going back to handwritten daybook lists in the office, and going
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5 September
Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
Amy texted me this list yesterday. I'm 60, closing in on 61, and thinking more about what I actually care about. The real luxuries in life: time, health, a quiet mind, slow mornings, rest without guilt, calm and "boring" days, people who love you back. feld.com
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Researcher of social media, privacy and youth culture; founder of Data & Society and author of It’s Complicated.
Many politicians are obsessed with the idea that non-citizens vote. The reality is often more complicated. Did you know that American Samoans have a US passport and yet cannot vote or run for office? Quoting @taniel.bsky.social Meaningful news earlier today. Many of you read and reacted to this story earlier this year on this Samoan woman in Alaska who was being prosecuted for voting alongside many in her family. A judge tossed her case today—a huge win, if just a first step in her story. America Related
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
remote work
Their words
And with remote work and entrepreneurship, people lack a space like an office where people would usually make friends or meet partners
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levels.io
4 September
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
If you hate boring small talk and actually want a deep, real conversation instead, there's a simple question swap that works almost instantly on anyone. Here's how it works: 🧵 Related
Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.
can you tell Astra is running my @every office fantasy team this is my team name: Related
Co-founder of Ximian and Xamarin; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; now an independent investor and funder of open technical projects, including the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum Papyri.
Their words
Smaller teams are better Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun No need to chop up work for political reasons
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Nat Friedman nat.org
2 September
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
An increasingly common pattern in my boring-administrivia workflows is creating a new folder with an inbox/ or unsorted/ subfolder, starting a Claude Code instance, and telling it "Watch that for changes, read incoming files, rename and organize into a directory structure." Anthropic Related
1 September
Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
SaaS
Their words
A regular boring but non-superficial SaaS app would do well 5 years ago but now it might not get anyone to sign up because it's so easy to vibe code by tens of thousands of other people
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@levelsio on X x.com
31 August
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
Warren Buffett: "If you must hold a prayer meeting before you try to raise prices, then you don't have much of a moat." TSMC and Samsung didn't hold prayer meetings before raising these prices. An assertion that these businesses don't have a moat isn't remotely credible. Quoting @dnystedt TSMC may raise prices across all process nodes by another 10% to 15% amid strong demand for AI-related chips - and Samsung’s ability to hike prices 10%-15% for its 4nm and 5nm offerings, media report, citing market expectations (NOT from TSMC). The market also reportedly sees follow on price hikes… Related
Bootstrapper and investor. Founder of TinySeed and MicroConf, host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and author of several books on self-funded software startups.
One of the biggest copes I hear from solo technical founders: “I don’t need to validate it. I’m building it for myself, so even if nobody else uses it, it’s still a success.” No. If you want to build something for yourself, great. That’s a project. If you want to build a product, you should do the work: talk to customers, validate demand, think about positioning and marketing, and work to build something people will actually pay for. You don’t get to skip all the hard, boring, uncomfortable parts of building a business and then redefine success as “well, I use it.” Build for yourself or build… startups Related
30 August
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
It's so great to be back at home! I missed my desk and office. Related
26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
From one piece
DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Anthropic
Their words
The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.
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youtube.com
Their words
And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over.
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youtube.com
24 August
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing, partner at MarketingProfs, and writer of the fortnightly Total Annarchy newsletter.
Engineer at Vercel Labs as of 2026. Ships a steady stream of small developer tools — agent-browser, portless, json-render, native-sdk, the v0 SDK — and lists every one of them at ctate.dev.
Their words
openai/gpt-5.6-luna-fast xhigh is *really* good at boring web dev tasks eg. migrations, ports, verifying work with agent-browser
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x.com
21 August
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
20 August
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
Their words
It'd be pretty annoying if they just start like spontaneously getting notifications during meetings that like, "Oh, it thought that you were thinking about an Uber, therefore it decided to summon summon two for you." And so you'll probably want these to be pretty explicit.
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youtube.com
18 August
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
. @yurimilner was that world class investor. After one meeting he said he wanted to invest and asked me for a valuation. I threw out a number 10 pct below what i figured our next round would be. He said he would wire the money next week. I think it was $150m. Never asked for board seat or any terms. He ttly got what the founder of a high growth company cared about. No meetings. No terms. Dont bother us. Let us cook! Quoting @kevinleeme Whenever other founders ask me who my best investors are and who I’d recommend they work with, I name the handful of VCs who rarely bother us and trust us to operate. It’s funny how simply doing nothing as an investor can put you in the top 1% of a founder’s book. Related
15 August
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
14 August
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
the reason @databricks "ipo is lava" fundraises are a meme is this but unironically the M in their $188B series M stands for "we are going to kill so many meetings" Quoting @alighodsi I got this question so many times today. "How can you grow 80% at $7B?" The true answer is that we're finally seeing a breakthrough with AI agents starting to work in the enterprise. The AIs have been super smart for a while, but have lacked basic context that's in people's heads, or in some SaaS s… Related
10 August
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
7 August
Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.
Their words
The long-term risk for Hollywood is that an age of original blockbusters raises the bar for success.
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derekthompson.org
4 August
Web designer; founder of SimpleBits, co-founder of Dribbble, and author of Bulletproof Web Design and Handcrafted CSS.
Mastodon The Serif Tee. New in the shop! The perfect ice-breaker to wear at your next office mixer. People that get it? Those are the folks you can hang with. simplebits.shop
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Bluesky The Serif Tee. New in the shop! The perfect ice-breaker to wear at your next office mixer. People that get it? Those are the folks you can hang with. simplebits.shop
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3 August
Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.
31 July
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Their words
But yeah, just like it's it's I've never met a Stripe customer and thought that's boring. Um so so it's actually the business as a whole has been the opposite of uh of the Schlep Blindness um instinct.
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youtube.com
30 July
American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.
as software engineers most of us are sitting in an office chair all day we spend hours staring at a screen, not moving more then our fingers or wrists sometimes we lock in and it feels like there are only occasional windows to move if so, start simple. take a screen break and do: - a 5-min walk around your house - 25 push-ups - 25 jumping jacks anything to break the chain of not moving trust me, you'll thank me in a year Related
23 July
Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.
Their words
Copilot, which uses a mix of AI models and is okay for working with office documents but lags badly in terms of its agentic abilities.
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oneusefulthing.org
20 July
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
16 July
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
I have some news. But first a little backstory. Almost exactly four years ago, I drove down to Mountain View for my first day as a Google employee. I was fifty-four years old, and somehow had managed to avoid ever having a proper job over that entire period, other than a few startups that I had founded in my twenties and thirties. At that point Google Labs, which had just been formed a few months earlier, was headquartered in a fairly anonymous looking suburban office park off 101, closer to Office Space than Silicon Valley on the Mike Judge spectrum. And as it happened, my first day at Googl… Google startups Related
13 July
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
9 July
Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.
28 June
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
24 June
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
22 June
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
16 June
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
15 June
Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.
Their words
I've been upgrading my home office setup, and these monitors have been part of that upgrade. So far I'm very happy with the picture and color quality of the monitors, and the pricing really wasn't too bad either. Here's the
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randallwilk.dev
Their words
Another part of my recent office upgrade was the Sanodesk 72x30 Standing Desk. Overall, I love this desk so far. The bamboo top looks and feels great, and I have plenty of room on the desk to set it up how I want to. Being able to raise it to a standing position is also nice too when I get sick of sitting.
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randallwilk.dev
10 June
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
4 June
Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.
AI and jobs
Their words
Like right now we're endowed with labor that can turn into uh that can turn into income. When that is no longer the case and we are now at the mercy of the of the elected official for like basic needs, right? So that to me feels like a power sharing arrangement that's really dangerous.
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youtube.com
3 June
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
Their words
if you nominate people whose life history reflects a high degree of unreliability, they may prove unreliable once in office.
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joshbarro.com
2 June
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
Their words
So I I don't do one-on- ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one ones.
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youtube.com
31 May
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
I am a Philistine, because I thought this was just OK. There were some good poems, quite a few which I found boring, and absolutely nothing that has stuck in my memory even a few weeks later.
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bactra.org
29 May
Game designer and programmer, co-founder of id Software and co-creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Now runs Romero Games in Galway, Ireland.
Congrats to Ardan on taking over the first floor of our old (but much loved) space in Galway City centre! @romerogamesltd moved to its new, larger office in Dockgate on Merchants Road in 2023 (reception pictured below). The old office had been used to store my archives. Quoting @galwayad As part of its continued growth as an organisation, the team at Ardán is relocating its headquarters from the CREW Hub on Wellpark Road into Galway city centre Related
27 May
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
Their words
The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill.
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scotthyoung.com
26 May
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
26 April
London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.
Today's Community Office Hours I started was fun! 🤩 Built some super cool stuff including: - A portal for Cats in Tech for members! - A portal for SSoC that tracks Live PRs getting merged! - A certificate distribution engine for comms! Happy to chat with you all on these! 💪🏻 Related
23 April
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
24 March
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
12 February
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
AI alignment
Their words
I know I have one blog post where I say, "I don't read the code." But if you read it more closely, I mean, I don't read the boring parts of code.
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youtube.com
27 January
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
7 January
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
Their words
This one only gets better with age. Although it’s only mentioned briefly, this is where Andy Grove first introduced OKRs to the world. His practical advice about meetings, especially the importance of 1-on-1s, inspired
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bringthedonuts.com
14 December 2025
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
Their words
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Made the random choice to listen to this and loved the experience (especially for getting through some of the boring parts, sorry). Shout out Maggie Gyllenhaal.
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haleynahman.substack.com
21 November 2025
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
15 November 2025
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
The Boring Part of Bell Labs It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing…
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26 October 2025
Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.
Some thoughts about how to schedule online meetings for a global organisation in an equitable way. mnot.net
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16 October 2025
Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.
Their words
we literally at some point had a team that would that was called blockers and they just went and one by one struck them down and each time we saw uh improvement in retention, improvement in activation the metrics for as we addressed each one you could literally see the change in the graph.
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youtube.com
15 September 2025
Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.
Is it possible to make virtual meetings feel less ... draining? Related
30 June 2025
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Their words
He takes a very proto-rationalist, practical approach to this, that I very much appreciate, complete with yearly predictions. The writing is consistently enjoyable and clear.
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thezvi.substack.com
13 June 2025
Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.
New blog post! How to Navigate the Tariff Circus 🤡 (see link in reply to this post) Summary: as @dollarsanddata would say, Just Keep Buying! The USA has a long history of lurching into dire-sounding situations, only to emerge surprisingly strong, surprisingly soon, on the other side. And this is just another one of those dramas from our never-boring homeland. Related
11 June 2025
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
9 June 2025
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
5 June 2025
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Their words
I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem, that’s not a communication problem.
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youtube.com
21 May 2025
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
3 Years of Extremely Remote Work In the last 3 years I've attended 77 meetings that began between 1am and 6am, roughly once every two weeks, followed by my usual 7am start, Monday to Saturday. I'm working remotely from Australia for a US firm (Intel) w…
remote work Related
14 May 2025
American open-source program lead working on WordPress; a WordPress core contributor and release lead who writes at jeffpaul.com.
Their words
Generic Office Chair with Upgraded Roller Blade Wheels — makes rolling around the office much easier.
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jeffpaul.com
26 March 2025
Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.
Their words
My everyday office gear that helps me debug, code, write documents seamlessly.
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varunraj.in
7 December 2024
Founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence and originator of Feedback-Informed Treatment. Writes about what actually makes a therapist effective, usually against the field's own assumptions about training and experience.
1 September 2024
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
3 June 2024
Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of rqlite, the distributed database built on SQLite.
Announcing Office Hours for rqlite, the lightweight distributed database built on #SQLite and #Raft. This is a great opportunity for you to ask questions or share ideas about rqlite directly with me. philipotoole.com
SQLite Related
1 June 2024
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
Their words
Chair: Steelcase Gesture office chair with cover in onyx black with headrest
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smakosh.com
30 May 2024
Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.
Zig's New CLI Progress Bar Explained Sometimes, programming projects are too easy and boring. Sometimes, they're too hard, never ending or producing subpar results. This past week I had the pleasure of completing a project that felt like maximum difficulty…
Related
17 March 2024
Engineering leader and writer on web operations and resilience engineering; formerly SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy and co-author of Web Operations.
Post-incident review meetings have much more going on than most people are aware of. https://t.co/gMp4VpFQPT #LFI #LearningFromIncidents Related
10 January 2024
Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.
10 December 2023
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
Their words
Instead of meetings, I used Workplace posts (Meta’s internal version of Facebook Group posts) to share thoughts, start discussions, and make announcements.
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borischerny.com
14 September 2023
Economic historian writing on the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence and the origins of modern growth.
Just another day at the office. Related
16 May 2023
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
28 February 2023
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
A lot of talk about managing focuses on "decisionmaking": how to run decision meetings, who gets to sign off on what, how they flow up + down the hierarchy... But IMO, management isn't (mainly) about decisions; it's about understanding and tweaking a complex system (of people). Related
31 July 2021
Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.
Their words
The main microphone I use for sessions and meetings. I use it in combination with the Elgato Wave Pop and Elgato Wave Shock Mount.
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eliostruyf.com
24 January 2021
Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.
2 October 2020
American senior staff engineer working on developer and user experience and open source; writes at adamdehaven.com.
Their words
Owala FreeSip - What I have determined is the perfect insulated water bottle to use at the office or when working from home.
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adamdehaven.com
1 June 2020
Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.
Their words
If you like seeing how to work out integrals in all sorts of crazy ways, boy is this the channel for you. Steven is a math teacher, and the videos have a feeling of being in office hours, honestly working through problems with a very skillful and enthusiastic teacher. Many of the problems covered are the kind you might come across in school, and many or just for fun.
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3blue1brown.com
22 May 2020
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Their words
face-to-face meetings are not inherently better. They can be time wasters just like anything else.
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thorstenball.com
15 May 2020
Web developer; former head of engineering at Flickr, author of Building Scalable Web Sites, and co-founder and CTO of Slack.
it's all about communication and support. don't treat remote workers as second class citizens. run better meetings. record decisions. make sure people are building relationships #AskTwitterEng Quoting @Engineering OK for real this time. Last question! What's one piece of advice you want to share with other engineering leaders looking to build collaborative remote teams? @michaelmontano @iamcal #AskTwitterEng Related
26 April 2020
American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.
Their words
I use a standing desk, specifically the Autonomous SmartDesk2 - Home Office.
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joeprevite.com
Their words
Part of what I do for work is record videos so they let me buy a new webcam: Logitech BRIO. I am very happy with it! Works well for streaming and video meetings.
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joeprevite.com
23 January 2020
Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.
Their words
At the office, I plug it into two of those LG UltraFine 4k monitors, a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard, and a Logitech MX Master mouse.
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usesthis.com
Their words
At the office, I plug it into two of those LG UltraFine 4k monitors, a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard, and a Logitech MX Master mouse. I plug in some Audioengine A2s for speakers.
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usesthis.com
13 January 2020
American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.
Their words
Personally, I thought the original Kinetic was ideal for hiking, but a little light on support for running. The Kinetic HD is just the opposite: they've been comfortable on runs up to 12 miles, but intentionally I no longer wear them for, say, Nordic skiing or office work.
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andrewskurka.com
1 January 2020
CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.
Their words
In 2019, I fell in love with Notion, which you can think of an all-in-one company/personal wiki + full MS Office-like suite.
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rauchg.com
22 August 2019
Writer and programmer; co-founder of the software studio Postlight and author of the Bloomberg Businessweek essay What Is Code?
Their words
I also use a maxed-out 12.9" iPad Pro for meetings and note-taking, with the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard.
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usesthis.com
20 August 2019
Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.
Their words
I use Calendly to schedule podcast interviews and other meetings. So much nicer than trying to work out a time to chat by going back and forth in an email thread.
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adamwathan.me
19 July 2019
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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