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Shipping things quickly, learning quickly, launching an MVP and iterating has defined software product building to date. Production speed is more important than craft. There’s a wave of new successful startups, like Superhuman and Linear, that are prioritizing building a rounded delightful product before it reaches the hands of consumers. Artisan software represents this trend towards optimizing UX from day one.
As founders, it’s nearly impossible to not work long hours in most cases. The same is likely true for your early hires. Here’s a reminder that productivity is not linear. Hours of input do not directly correlate to output.
Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway face a "scaled-out problem" due to their immense success, where growth becomes challenging as they expand into less profitable or more complex business areas. While Amazon experiments across various sectors like entertainment and healthcare, Berkshire prefers concentrated buyouts and equity purchases, yet both strategies reflect the complexity and risks of managing enormous companies at the peak of their success.
This article shares how potential hires might be assessing your company before they join. This is a useful framework to apply in order to attract top talent and sell them on the future upside of the company.
There’s a little space just before impossible. It’s nearly impossible. In other words, it’s really hard to do it. That’s where entrepreneurs should focus. That’s where competition will be thin, daunted by the challenge, and rewards outsized for those who achieve the nearly impossible.
In this episode of Topline, Jason Lemkin discusses his experience and insights on investing, particularly in the context of platform shifts and valuation trends in tech industries. He reflects on the evolution of consumer companies, the impact of AI, and the dynamics of investment, noting the challenges of finding truly groundbreaking opportunities and the risks involved. Lemkin also talks about the lessons learned from different investment phases and the importance of being cautious in times of high valuations and market bubbles.
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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a cybersecurity advisory in response to the exploitation of CVE-2023-26360 by unidentified threat actors at a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency. At least two public-facing servers were compromised between June and July 2023. The advisory provides network defenders with tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), indicators of compromise (IOCs), and methods to detect and protect against similar exploitation.
Google has released the December 2023 Android security updates, which address 85 vulnerabilities, including a critical zero-click remote code execution (RCE) bug. The RCE bug, tracked as CVE-2023-40088, was found in Android's System component and can be exploited without additional privileges.
A new variant of the P2Pinfect malware has been discovered specifically targeting embedded devices based on 32-bit MIPS processors. The malware attempts to brute force SSH access to these devices, making it highly likely that routers and IoT devices will be infected.
The Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures (MCRA) are shared as part of the Security Adoption Framework. This post describes how Microsoft's cybersecurity capabilities integrate with their own and third party platforms. The resource includes information on antipatterns, best practices, and threat trends, among other topics. It also includes detailed technical diagrams for various aspects of cybersecurity.
A humble and fast security-oriented HTTP headers analyzer.
IMDSpoof is a tool that spoofs the AWS IMDS service running on an EC2 instance. The tool spoofs the security-credentials IMDS endpoint and redirects it to a local webserver. This webserver can utilize Thinkst Canary HoneyTokens to alert on user access.
Copacetic can be used to quickly patch a container without going upstream for rebuild based on vulnerabilities. This can be used to shorten incident response times because the time from vulnerability announcement to active exploitation continues to narrow.
Microsoft has confirmed a bug that causes all printers to be renamed to HP LaserJet M101-M106, leading to automatic installation of the HP Smart app on Windows 10 and 11 devices. This occurs even on systems that are not HP computers or printers.
Security research firm Vulncheck claims that 15,000 Go module repositories on GitHub are vulnerable to an attack called repojacking, where bad actors take advantage of account username changes and deletions to create repositories with the same name and stage open-source software supply chain attacks. These repositories account for at least 800,000 Go module-versions.
AWS IAM Access Analyzer has added a new analyzer to continuously monitor roles and users for permissions that are granted and not used. The custom policy checks can be integrated with a CI/CD tool to allow for reporting on whether a change will add any additional IAM permissions.
A post from Troy Hunt reflecting on and detailing the history of Have I Been Pwned on its 10th birthday.
Tailscale announced a collaboration with TruffleHog to add their secrets’ patterns to TruffleHog. The tool will now be able to detect exposed Tailscale secrets in source code.
PWC discusses how they're tracking a highly capable Türkiye-nexus threat actor known as Teal Kurma.
Instagram’s Trend Talk shares the results of a survey looking at Gen Z trends across the US, UK, Brazil, India, and South Korea. It identifies trends and topics people can expect to see all over the platform in 2024—fashion, dating, music, tech, and more. Gen Z's trends are poised to drive global cultural shifts. These include practicing sustainable fashion, focusing on self-improvement, and taking action on social issues most important to them.
Users will no longer be able to chat with Facebook accounts on Instagram starting mid-December. Any existing cross-app chats will become read-only, which means they’ll remain archived, but will no longer be active. Brands are advised to revise their strategic plans for connecting with their audiences via these platforms.
People are willing to pay up to 39% more when companies offer to take back and recycle products at the end of their lifecycle. In one study, 65% of people chose a more expensive shirt with a take-back program, compared to a regular shirt. This happens because people dislike wasting resources and give more value to products when they have a stronger sense of ownership over them.
Horizontal products are arguably the hardest to market because there are often standalone products within an ecosystem. The platform positioning structure provided in the post helps organize and separate use cases under specific products. It can also help inform TOFU and BOFU content strategies.
Generative AI can decipher complicated patents, summarize long narratives into key points and definitions, and extract important sections of ebooks and whitepapers for blogs and promotional materials. This post covers 4 tools including ChatGPT, Claude, PDF Pals, and Ask Your PDF.
This report provides an analysis of the martech market. It explains what’s happening in the vendor landscape, especially with AI, and how we see that reflected in adoption in tech stacks. It also covers trends in martech stacks as CMOs and marketing ops are caught between choosing greater efficiency vs. faster innovation. Financial efficiency pushes for stack consolidation, while disruptive innovation requires heavy investment.
Brands become forgettable when they try to be everything instead of focusing on their core strategy. For example, Five Guys intentionally did not expand their menu to salads or coffee in order to maintain focus on their burgers and fries. Brands should focus on doing less—but better—and be unapologetic about it. It also helps to take the complexity away from the customer so they know exactly what value you offer to them.
Gen AI automates content generation, personalizes marketing campaigns, and analyzes customer behavior at scale. It is expected to boost global productivity by up to $4.4 trillion annually, with Marketing and Sales representing 75% of that total.
GitHub has revolutionized open-source marketing by transforming how projects are developed, shared, and promoted.
This guide provides an in-depth look into how ranking works in Google Search. It covers indexing, algorithms, deep learning systems, human raters, and more.
These prompt examples show you how to ask ChatGPT for iterative feedback, concept validation, and more.
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A poorly implemented authentication system [5] is a recipe for disaster. And given the increase in data beaches in the past few years, it’s more important than ever for software engineering leaders to prioritize security, quality development practices, and robust governance controls. This article by FusionAuth [5] covers key best practices for mitigating common risks when implementing authentication — including application security, password hashing, regulatory compliance, costs, integration, and vendor assessment. Read the full article here
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are an open standard for securely sharing JSON data between parties through encoding and digital signatures. They are used for API authentication, data transfer, and authorization workflows. JWTs consist of three parts: a header, payload, and signature, and can be used to securely transmit data between various systems. While JWTs offer benefits like statelessness, efficiency, and interoperability, they also pose challenges such as security risks, token size, and limited central control.
Canva has implemented end-to-end distributed tracing for observability in their systems. They emphasize the Three Pillars of Observability: logs (timestamped events), metrics (quantifiable statistics), and traces (representation of request events). With distributed tracing, they use traces, spans (single operations within a trace), and tags (metadata key-value pairs) to gain insights into their system's performance. Canva also developed a custom frontend tracing SDK for themselves.
This article discusses the importance of speed and personalization in web applications. Fast loading times are crucial for user engagement and search engine rankings. The article explains how being on the edge, caching mechanisms, and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) can help developers create faster web apps.
A "Manager's ReadMe" is a document that outlines expectations for their reports. It provides insights into the manager's role, how they do 1:1 meetings, their office and remote work policies, team representation, communication channels, and work-related practices like sprint planning, retrospectives, and feature ownership. Creating such a document helps foster better trust in teams. This post shares a template for people to create a “readme” of their own to let others on their team understand their working style.
RFCs (Request For Comments) are documents proposing codebase changes to address specific problems or introduce new features before actual implementation begins. This post outlines when to write an RFC and their benefits and offers guidance on writing one, including sections like metadata, defining the problem, proposing solutions, and addressing open questions. It also provides templates and tools for creating RFCs.
Chrome 120 comes with the new CloseWatcher API, an API for directly listening and responding to close requests. Close requests are typically used to close popups and modals. They are typically the ESC key on desktop platforms and the back gesture or button on Android. Chrome 120 also comes with an easy-to-implement accordion pattern with the details element, permission policy violation reports, and more.
Dropbase is a platform for building internal web apps such as admin panels and internal engineering tools with Python. It lets you import your existing Python libraries and scripts, select UI components and bind them to data, and use State and Context objects to modify state and context directly with Python. Developers can share apps they create on Dropbase with other users via roles, groups, permissions, and other controls.
SuperDuperDB is an open-source framework for integrating AI directly with existing databases. The framework helps eliminate complex MLOps pipelines and specialized vector databases by turning existing databases into AI development and deployment environments. It supports LLM chat, streaming inference, scalable model training, vector search, and standard machine learning use cases.
This blog post provides a high-level overview of the internals of iMessage. It covers the Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) and its bidirectional capabilities, the role of IDS (Identity Services) as a keyserver for iMessage's end-to-end encryption, and the process of message encryption and decryption.
This article shows how different SQL database systems execute a peculiar SQL query, which involves subqueries and aggregation functions. Some systems follow the SQL standard and return a single row with the value 6, while others return values 3, 6, and 9 in a table of three rows. The article delves into the SQL standard's specifications regarding aggregation queries, outer references, and historical changes in behavior among different database systems.
Apache Kafka has introduced Tiered Storage, which allows for the separation of compute and storage. This article explores the architecture, use cases, benefits, and even presents a case study of storing petabytes of data in the Kafka commit log. Tiered Storage optimizes storage resources by using different storage tiers based on data access patterns, performance requirements, and cost considerations.
A website that shows how your computer reached the server the website is hosted on.