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...
Sep 08, 2023 from Michael Lynch Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek Documentary, 18 Years Later In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college inte...
Jul 07, 2023 from Remains of the Day How to Blow Up a Timeline NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so...
Mar 01, 2022 from Remains of the Day My Favorite Movies of 2021 A second year of the pandemic passed in which I didn’t attend any film festivals in person. I miss it. My viewing output of is lower than usual but still much much higher than that of the median fi...
Oct 10, 2021 from Remains of the Day And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now...
Feb 22, 2021 from Remains of the Day American Idle I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to ...
Sep 21, 2020 from Remains of the Day Seeing Like an Algorithm In my previous post on TikTok I discussed why its For You Page algorithm is the connective tissue that makes TikTok work. It is the bus on its motherboard that connects and closes all its feedback ...
Aug 04, 2020 from Remains of the Day TikTok and the Sorting Hat I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situat...
