AI has made building easier.
But building the right thing is still hard.
Ten articles every week on what is happening across product, research, design and engineering. Curated by Rory Madden to help teams decide what to build.
Explore the editions ↓The archive
A few years ago the biggest problem to solve in product development was the gap between developers and operations. New DevOps practices emerged to ensure better collaboration between the teams.
Read edition ↗While benchmarking his system, Andres Freund, a developer at Microsoft, noticed an anomaly that unravelled into a scenario worthy of a cyber espionage thriller.The core of this story focuses on XZ Utils, a seemingly innocuous open-source library for file compression and decompres
Read edition ↗Lots of product jobs were cut last year across the board from product management, research, design and development. Luckily there appears to be signs that the economy had a soft landing and hiring is starting to come back.
Read edition ↗Marty Cagan has released a new book, Transformed, which goes into how companies can transition to empowered product teams.
Read edition ↗A new AI tool, Devin, was launched this week, which created a bit of fuss in the dev community. Devin is billed as an AI programmer, and while it is not (yet) a replacement for software developers, it goes far beyond the prompt-driven coding approach that other tools use. Devin c
Read edition ↗With the recent spate of layoffs in the tech industry, there has been a resurgence in the concept of the Player-Coach manager for teams; a manager who looks after the team while still delivering as an individual contributor.
Read edition ↗After a loud and resounding backlash against Apple's decision to remove PWA features from Safari they have backed down and confirmed that they will keep all existing features.
Read edition ↗Google's Gemini AI has been making headlines for some of the more interesting responses that they generate, leading them to turn off image generation.
Read edition ↗A few weeks ago I asked whether PWAs will take off this year. There were positive signs that Apple would need to enable PWA functionality that they had been holding back for the past 5+ years - but they came up with a pretty cynical workaround.
Read edition ↗Basecamp was one of the first to shift to the new SaaS (software as a service) model back in 2003. It was such a new concept at the time that their bank pushed back on recurring payments expecting a lot of chargebacks!
Read edition ↗That's a common complaint when you talk to business stakeholders and senior leaders. This puts a lot of pressure on development managers to ensure that committed dates are achieved, and they pass that pressure on to their teams.
Read edition ↗Meta has described 2023 as their year of efficiency and noted that productivity went up as their number of employees went down.
Read edition ↗30% of respondents in our last survey were not familiar with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). I think PWAs are going to be important so let's dive into this topic a bit further.
Read edition ↗