The Platform Trap: Building on Someone Else's Land
Platform dependency killed Apollo, PostMyParty, and hundreds of apps when Twitter, Reddit, and Meta changed their APIs. Platform risk is existential risk....
Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
Platform dependency killed Apollo, PostMyParty, and hundreds of apps when Twitter, Reddit, and Meta changed their APIs. Platform risk is existential risk....
The JavaScript framework ecosystem keeps solving the same problems with new syntax every 2-3 years....
Voice AI demos work perfectly. Production deployments fail. After a decade building speech systems, here's why the gap exists and how to bridge it....
Blockchain has been 'revolutionary' for 15 years without revolutionizing anything. Every enterprise blockchain quietly becomes a regular database....
When your product stops growing: a diagnostic checklist that separates user-fit problems from distribution problems from market exhaustion....
Founder ego sinks more startups than market fit or capital. Twelve patterns I see across due-diligence calls, with the questions that surface them in 20 minutes....
Programming in the pre-internet era meant libraries, magazines, and BBSs....
Technical blog posts were searchable, skimmable, and copy-pasteable. Video tutorials are none of these....
Debt implies payback. You won't. It compounds faster than interest. Every startup that says 'we'll clean it up after we raise' never does....
Software piracy in the 80s and 90s built the networks, protocols, and communities that became legitimate tech infrastructure....
Code review as practiced by most teams is a bottleneck that provides less value than we pretend. Small PRs, distributed reviewing, and time SLAs can fix it....
After 45 years in tech, I know I work faster alone. The collaboration-industrial complex says more interaction is always better. My shipped code says otherwise....

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