The Nonconformist

I have watched the Internet slowly turn from something that felt like a library into something that feels like a store. And the strange part is that I can’t point to any single moment when it happened. There was no announcement. Nobody put up a sign saying that the Internet...

Have you ever reached the end of a day feeling oddly tired, only to realise you haven’t actually done very much? No marathon workday, no impossible deadline, no heroic attempt to get through an overflowing to-do list. And yet, all you want to do is put your phone away and...

When the PHP2Shell news broke on October 21, I wasn’t thinking about the future of AI. I was thinking about our clients’ websites. At Renderbit, we build and maintain applications for clients who expect them to work, including when something goes wrong in software neither they nor we wrote. The...

Most repositories I work with now have some sort of instruction file for coding agents. It might be an AGENTS.md, a CLAUDE.md, or a set of rules stored in tool-specific directories. At first, these files seemed like a convenience. Put the build commands and a few coding preferences in Markdown,...

For most of my career, writing software has meant making a series of compromises around a scarce resource: engineering time. We decide which features deserve it, which bugs can wait, how much we can afford to test, and which parts of a system are worth rebuilding. The code itself takes...

Show me an app built in an afternoon with a coding agent, and I’ll probably be impressed. Ask me whether I’d put it in front of a client, with real users, real data, and someone calling us when it fails, and I’ll have a rather different set of questions. We’ve...

I say the word “ownership” a lot. To my team, to new hires, in one-on-ones, probably in half my Slack messages. But it struck me recently that I use it constantly without ever really explaining what it means to me. So, ownership. When I ask “can you own this?” or...

Whatever happened to long-form prose? In this era of social media, where status updates and 140-character tweets dominate our attention spans, the art of writing at length seems to be fading into obscurity. It’s a trend that’s been happening for years, as brevity has become the preferred mode of communication...

I recently came across this Twitter thread, where @samuelstancl listed tips for writing cleaner code in Laravel, as well as some general Laravel coding advice. These are a great starting point to develop a sense for what’s good code and what’s bad code - so I collated them below (with...

Dear fellow startup founder, The worst part of the Covid-19 crisis isn’t just that previously-profitable businesses have touched zero revenues - it is that there is no visibility on a timeline for a return to normalcy or even an end in sight. This isn’t the first time we have seen...

This article is an in-spirit continuation of the previous one. India is a growing market for food consumption. Uber Eats has significantly ramped up, with engaging ad campaigns having leading celebrities. Uber Eats does 1/3rd of Swiggy orders, yet the company is being sold for 1/10th of Swiggy’s valuation. Why...

In today’s world, one would be hard-pressed indeed to come across someone who has not heard of Uber in any way. From a ride-sharing startup on the streets of San Francisco to a global transportation behemoth valued at a mind-boggling $70 billion, the startup, as they say, has apparently seen...

We so often face the scenario when we wanted to look up something on our mobile phones, but gave up halfway when the site was too slow to load. In a world where more traffic is moving to mobile from traditional desktop browsers, loading speed has become a major factor...

We spend our life in search of inspiration. But inspiration is not something that adheres to a schedule, or a deadline, or a timeframe. Inspiration is that idea gnawing at the back of your head at three am in the morning, which makes you push back the sheets, climb out...