Engineering Management
Tom So and
“Such a good morning’s writing I’d planned, and wasted the cream of my brain on the telephone,” the author Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1920.
The point of middleware is always the same— integrate things on one side with things on the other side. The promise is always that betting on the middleware allows a single party to avoid relying on any instance of one side of the equation while being able to take advantage of the full breadth of market capabilities on the other side. Middleware is
... See moreMiddleware never quite lives up to these promises in practice. MCP, if history is any guide, will go down one of two paths:
Everyone will use it.
Everyone but one key platform will use it
When (1) happens two things will be true. First, no one will effectively monetize it. Second, every vendor will also add unique aspects to how they consume (client)
... See moreThe biggest challenge with middleware is that for it to be successful and not stifle innovation middleware needs to be the sum of all the capabilities that it chooses to integrate. Middleware always starts off simple because it always starts off in the earliest days of new platforms. The platform is just simple so it is easy to envision middleware.
... See morefrom Private Equity by Carrie Sun
Many people who first entered senior roles in 2010-2020 are finding current roles a lot less fun. There are a number of reasons for this. First, managers were generally evaluated in that period based on their ability to hire, retain and motivate teams. The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a diff
... See moreAdding one extra feature nearly cost us our startup.
Monday morning, anxiety twisted in my chest as I deleted half of our codebase.
Our product was buried under features, each an attempt to stave off failure, yet leaving us on the brink of collapse. The team lingered, eyes glued to my screen.
“It’s too cluttered,” I finally said, swallowing my fear.
My
... See more