This post will be a bit different for me because it’s not even remotely about my usual technology & startup rants.

I used to build sites in PHP & HTML. I’d deploy them to a web server over FTP and that was it. But starting out today feels paradoxically both harder and easier than ever before.

BunnyCDN is based in Slovenia. It’s the first serious European challenger to Cloudflare. It doesn’t do everything Cloudflare does, but it’s excellent at what it offers.

For years, iCloud Mail has been sold as a seamless extension of the Apple ecosystem. It’s private, it’s secure and it just works. In reality, though, it’s broken.

Dispensing with all niceties, let’s get straight to the point: hiring the wrong person can be a disaster.

I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade.

I’ve built products used by millions. I’ve led teams, mentored junior engineers, scaled startups, grown insane databases. It used to be exciting. Now, I’m not so sure.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this - I think perhaps it’s cropped up in my mind a few times over the past decade.

Some of the best B2B SaaS products I’ve used started out as great consumer tools. I have found that if somebody has a tool they can’t live without, they’ll advocate for it within their workplace. And let’s be real—people love nice things, especially when they’re free.

I’ve been using CleanShot for a bit over five years. I have no complaints except that it’s attached to my SetApp subscription, something that I was fine paying for until some of my favorite apps left the service. I essentially now only use Lungo, TablePlus and CleanShot X – the first two of which I now have one-off licenses for.

I’ve been dragged back into Jira after five years of bliss with Linear, and it’s rough.