Because .com Wasn't Available

I've struggled to manage my work and personal email for years. Recently, I found my solution: use Superhuman Mail . The Problem: I get tons of emails that are not easy to unsubscribe from or automatically filter. A lot of it is cold outreach from salespeople. A lot of it is updates from kid events, school, etc., and requests for surveys, interviews, and paid engagements. These are not easy to filter out using traditional Gmail filters. Plus, setting up all these filters takes time. What I Tried: First, I switched to Hey.com, attracted by its approach of grouping emails—like the paper trail and the feed. I appreciated features like bubble-up, but after 18 months, Hey didn’t meet my needs. The platform emphasizes categorization and quick reading over archiving, making it difficult for me to maintain a zero-inbox, especially with my high volume. Additionally, as I continued using Hey, issues emerged: some contacts emailed my Hey address, while others stuck with Gmail, making managing ...

One of my favorite movies of all time is V for Vendetta . There’s a particular scene that sticks in my memory: it’s towards the end of the movie, when Inspector Finch is talking to his assistant Dominic Stone. Here’s the clip  (it's worth the 1-minute watch). This is how I feel about AI in 2026, specifically AI-assisted software development. Let’s start with a timeline of the last 18 months. These are just the major milestones that I’ve personally engaged with in a meaningful way; trying to provide a timeline of all AI launches over the last 18 months would make this post insanely long. Some quick points first: I reference a lot of Steve Yegge’s posts and work. In my view, he’s the current thought leader in AI-assisted development and literally wrote the book on Vibe Coding. He’s also pushing the envelope with the tools he’s building, as you will see later in the post. While this post was AI-assisted, of course, the vast majority of it was written by me. Let’s begin! Timeline June...

I get a lot of questions like, "You seem to know a lot about business for a technical CTO. How?" and "I'd like to be a CTO someday. Do you have any tips?" First and foremost, a CTO is a business-focused role. You must be able to do whatever the business requires most at any given moment, whether that's coding, technical architecture, hiring, raising money, selling, conducting a layoff, leading Product, being a stand-in COO, or otherwise.  One of my common responses to these questions is, "Read and be curious!" But read what, exactly? Since I'm a fan of scalable communication, I'm documenting my recommended reading list here for public consumption.  This list is current as of March 2024, and I plan on updating it ~yearly. Top Ten Business Books (Must Read) Ten might seem like a lot of books, but an executive should be reading 10-20 books a year, and when you multiply that by a 10-20 year career to become an executive, you'll have read hu...

I’ve always disliked this phrase, and it felt like a pure contradiction - you wouldn’t need to verify if you truly trust. It has come up recently in my life and work, so I decided to dig in and crystallize my thoughts. The phrase originated as a Russian proverb (doveryai, no proveryai) and is attributed to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin . Inauspicious beginnings, to say the least. Ronald Reagan then co-opted it in 1986 to refer to nuclear disarmament, and from there, it entered the American lexicon. People often consider it a leadership principle or some fundamental truth, which needs more nuance.  As a leader, one must decide how to operate in different contexts. A good initial posture is to distrust and verify often until you have built up the appropriate level of trust over a long enough period. I’ve had so many occasions in my career when I heard some variant of: The code is terrible The code we’re writing is excellent! That’s impossible That will take months We’re in a good ...

My wife and I have driven a Model S for over 2 years, and a Model 3 for a couple months. We get a lot of questions about whether we like the cars, Tesla in general, and whether the “cheaper Tesla” is worth buying. This post is an attempt to answer those questions, clear up some misconceptions, and present a clear case why the Model 3 is a great buy if you are in the market for a new sedan. Cost Let’s start with the most important thing for most people who are buying a car - overall cost. The Model 3 is available in three trims right now (options add cost on top of this): Standard Range Plus: $39,500 and 240 miles of range Long Range: $49,500 and 310 miles of range (includes dual motor all wheel drive) Performance: $59,500 and 310 miles of range (includes dual motor all wheel drive) These numbers are all before incentives, if you buy the mid range battery and take delivery before the end of Q2, you will get a $3750 Federal Tax Credit, and whatever state incentives ...

I'm co-organizing  React Boston , the first react.js focused conference in New England this fall! The conference will be held on September 23rd-24th (this is a weekend), in the heart of Boston at Wayfair's main office. It will be a single track event with topics around React itself, Relay, GraphQL, React Native, and more. The CFP is open , and tickets are on sale now . We really want this event to be a success, and we'd love to see there!

This was originally a Facebook post, but I'm preserving it here in a slightly longer format due to the transient nature of Facebook. August 2016 was the hottest August ever . So was July. And June. And so on for the last 11 months. Here’s a scary animation . No country is taking this seriously , and if we continue on our current path the Earth will be uninhabitable in 100-200 years. Global warming may seem easy to ignore, because the effects appear far off and irrelevant to people living in first world countries. Climate change denial (or even acceptance without behavior modification) is perhaps the most extreme example of Hyperbolic Discounting  in the history of the human race. Partly this is because it can seem impossible to make any changes yourself that will have an impact. I hope I can convince you otherwise. I’m sure you’ve heard about global warming causing stronger storms , rising sea levels , and a variety of other long term downsides that may or may not impact yo...

My second Pluralsight course, Composer: Getting Started , just went live! This is another course that's loosely based on a talk I've given in the past, with a lot more of the details fleshed out. The course covers the following topics: The Basics of Composer Including Third Party Code Autoloading Your Code Composer Scripts Publishing Your Own Composer Package Check it out on Pluralsight today, and let me know what you think!

I've just published my first Pluralsight Course:  High Performance PHP ! I've spoken about this topic a number of times in the past, so it seemed like a good fit for my first foray into the screen casting world. This course also has much more that PHP optimizations in it. The five modules are: Optimizing PHP Code Choosing and Configuring a Web Server Database Optimization Performance and Load Testing Investigating Performance Tradeoffs of PHP Frameworks Modules two, three and four are largely language agnostic, so even if you aren't using PHP you can get a lot out of this course. Here's a demo clip going over the different MySQL forks and how best to configure MySQL: I hope you enjoy the course, and I'd love to hear any feedback you have! Watch the full course here .

When I left Etsy at the end of February, it was because I wanted to join something small where I could have a lot of impact. I did that, becoming a co-founder/CTO at a three person startup in Boston in the online grocery space. Unfortunately that business didn't work out, and closed its doors for good on April 6th. That left me wondering what to do next, and I spent the month of April talking to a lot of companies and exploring opportunities. I wanted to stick with my original plan of joining a small company, but I decided to make post-Series A companies my main focus, to take away some of the risk that I experienced at a seed stage, pre-product company. I was introduced to Attend by a friend, and the company fit all of my criteria. It has a popular product in the market, has around 30 employees (~5 full-time engineers), just raised a Series A , is in growth mode, and has a great team. There's a ton of potential for me to learn technically there and grow as a leader. Attend ...

February 27th was my last day at Etsy, concluding 2.5 years as a remote employee (more on what's next in a future post). A lot has been written about remote work, including a recent book , but I wanted to talk about my own experience and some of the lessons that I learned over the past few years. Overall Etsy does a great job with remote employees, and it continues to get better. During my last couple of weeks at Etsy they were rolling out a new policy that added a number of additional benefits for remotes (including the ability to bring your spouse with you to the main Etsy office in Brooklyn for a week once a year). All that said, at the end of the day I believe that how much you enjoy working remotely is more a function of your personality than the perks that your company provides. Generally I think there's a correlation between how introverted you are and how much you enjoy remoteness. Here's how I put it in my last lecture at Etsy, discussing how my expectations  m...

I've decided to narrow the focus of this blog, exclusively covering the following topics: Software Engineering Web Technologies Web Performance My Career  All of fitness related posts (pushupdates, GORUCK events, etc.) are moving to my new blog at fitness.jkle.in . I realize that the overlap between people who care about web technology and people who care about my crazy fitness goals is vanishingly small, so head over there and subscribe if you are interested in the latter.

I completed my first GORUCK event on 9/13, a Light in Boston. We covered about 8 miles in 5 hours and I was carrying roughly 30 pounds. Overall it met my expectations as a challenging event, although with significantly less focus on calisthenics than I expected. The vast majority of our time was spent rucking around Boston, with minimal time spent doing push-ups, flutter kicks, etc. My class met at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the center of Boston Common, although we quickly had to move to the garden nearby to avoid a marijuana legalization festival. Our cadre checked everyone in, opened our rucks to check that we had the right amount of weight, and had us form up to listen to a little background on GORUCK. This particular event was special because it was a 9/11 commemorative event, so we spent extra time talking about the events of that day and why the cadre chose to serve in the military. We were informed that this “would not be a normal Light” and to “get ready for a dif...