May 19, 2025 from The Fly Blog Launching MCP Servers on Fly.io This is a blog post. Part showing off. Part opinion. Plan accordingly. The Model Context Protocol is days away from turning six months old. You read that right, six months old. MCP Servers have bot...
May 13, 2025 from Steve Blank How the United States Gave Up Being a Science Superpower This article previously appeared in Nature. US global dominance in science was no accident, but a product of a far-seeing partnership between public and private sectors to boost innovation and econ...
May 07, 2025 from The Fly Blog Provisioning Machines using MCPs Today’s state of the art is K8S, Terraform, web based UIs, and CLIs. Those days are numbered. On Monday, I created my first fly volume using an MCP. For those who don’t know what MCPs are, they are...
Apr 25, 2025 from Michael Lynch My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author I just received $5,947 in advance sales for my first technical book, even though it’s only 25% complete, and I’m self-publishing it. The book is called Refactoring English, and it’s a guide for sof...
Apr 15, 2025 from Steve Blank How the U.S. Became A Science Superpower Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ...
Mar 31, 2025 from Michael Lynch My Book's Pre-Sale Just Barely Succeeded For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobo...
Mar 19, 2025 from Michael Lynch No Longer My Favorite Git Commit Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and ha...
Feb 03, 2025 from Michael Lynch My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder Seven years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie foun...
Jan 08, 2025 from Michael Lynch if got, want: A Simple Way to Write Better Go Tests There’s an excellent Go testing pattern that too few people know. I can teach it to you in 30 seconds. Instead of writing Go tests like this: // The common, unrefined way. username := GetUser() if ...
Nov 13, 2024 from Michael Lynch Lessons from my First Exit In April of this year, I sold TinyPilot, the bootstrapped hardware company I founded and ran for four years. I wrote a post in May that told the story of the sale, but I’d like to share more about ...
Oct 23, 2024 from Michael Lynch Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One) Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools...
Oct 23, 2024 from Michael Lynch Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part Two) This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow. At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things starte...
Oct 22, 2024 from Steve Blank Quantum Computing – An Update In March 2022 I wrote a description of the Quantum Technology Ecosystem. I thought this would be a good time to check in on the progress of building a quantum computer and explain more of the basic...
Oct 08, 2024 from Steve Blank How Saboteurs Threaten Innovation–and What to Do About It This article first appeared in First Round Review. “Only the Paranoid Survive” Andy Grove – Intel CEO 1987-1998 I just had an urgent “can we meet today?” coffee with Rohan, an ex-student. His three...
Oct 05, 2024 from Steve Blank What Does Product Market Fit Sound Like? This. I got a call from an ex-student asking me “how do you know when you found product market fit?” There’s been lots of words written about it, but no actual recordings of the moment. I remembered I ha...
Sep 17, 2024 from Steve Blank How To Find Your Customer In the Dept of Defense – The Directory of DoD Program Executive Offices Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? How do you know if they have money to spend on your product? It alm...
May 29, 2024 from Michael Lynch I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business My first two years as a bootstrapped founder went poorly. I could barely find any paying customers, and all of my businesses lost money. I began questioning my decision to quit my cushy Google job....
Apr 05, 2024 from Michael Lynch Building My First Homelab Server Rack Seven years ago, I built my first home server. It made my software development work faster and more enjoyable, so I’ve gotten more into the home server scene. I built a custom storage server, anoth...
Mar 19, 2024 from Michael Lynch Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster? .chart-container { max-width: 800px; max-height: 300px; display: flex; justify-content: center; } For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and...
Feb 16, 2024 from Michael Lynch My Sixth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred do...
