Alex Kurilin

This is going to come off as grumpy, but it needs to be said: Stop showing people your junk. Everyone can build junk with AI now. Nobody else wants to see your junk. We're not kindred spirits just because we both build junk. Play with your junk strictly i

We are happy each time we disagree, because we know we're going to learn something new; it's going to make some sparkle. -Bertrand Piccard, Swiss explorer The Late Night Slack Ping It's 11:47 PM on a Tuesday night and I'm trying to figure out why our data

It's late, I'm on my second decaf, and I've been putting off adding a terminal to Kale for days - convinced it'll be the usual slog of incompatible libraries, StackOverflow spelunking, and documentation rabbit holes. Then I remember: none of that applies

"Our goal is to inspire every person at Netflix to be excellent at their job. If you would not fight hard to keep someone at Netflix, we want to make it safe and quick to let them go." - Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules The early morning playbook It's 8:30am

If you want to catch trout, don't fish in the bathtub. -Popular saying 1. Rough awakening I hit the submit button on AngelList, finally uploading the job description (JD) that I had spent an hour putting together, format entirely cargo-culted from some tr

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. -Alfred North Whitehead It hasn't even been a year since the launch of Claude Code, the breakout coding agent of the year. Together with i

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. -Arthur Schopenhauer The second that the next round of funding hits the bank, every new CTO starts obsessing over the same thing: Who the hell do I hire next? The answer i

If you look at all of the C-level roles out there, the only one that has no template or definition is CTO. -Charity Majors It's 2014, a couple of years since I started as the technical co-founder and CTO at Freckle Education, and I realize I have no idea

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there. -Yogi Berra The Paths In every early-stage startup's life cycle, there comes a time when you have to decide what game your employees should be playing: the Grow the Pie (GtP) game, or the Grow

When you come to a fork in the road, take it. -Yogi Berra The Breaking Point: When You Can't Do It All Anymore It's 2016 and my company, Freckle, is finally seeing real traction with teachers. The self-serve freemium plan is bearing fruit and new classroo