Steve Hanov's Blog

If you spent any time on tech LinkedIn in the spring of 2026, you probably saw them. They were everywhere. A highly coordinated swarm of 20-something engineers posting about a little-known Waterloo AI startup called Polarity . By the time the fellowship w

I was talking to Mike Bird , who podcasts about AI tools. He asked me if I was using Hermes. "Of COURSE! Everyone knows HERMES. Who doesn't love a good... Hermes!" I said, slyly googling under the camera. Soon, I was having PTSD flashbacks to my experienc

At first, you're excited. The easy stuff is easy, and it spurs you on. "I can do this." You learn numbers. Common objects. Basketball for some reason. When you say something to a native speaker, their face lights up. "Lihai! Your Chinese is so good!" They

jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.

If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein dista

90% of Waterloo's top deals happened at these 6 coffee shops. Skip this? You'll miss Canada's next unicorn. Proven VC secrets to find the billion-dollar star...

Last night, I was rejected from yet another pitch night. It was just the pre-interview, and the problem wasn't my product. I already have MRR. I already have users who depend on it every day. The feedback was simply: "What do you even need funding for?" I

I was working on a project the other night, using Google's Gemini to help brainstorm a technical plan. If you've used it recently, you've probably seen the "Canvas" feature. It pops up on the right side of your screen, rendering code and text beautifully.

I recently had a problem that could be solved with money, which is the worst kind of problem. I am building a new venture called eh-trade.ca . To make it work, I needed deep financial research on 11,000 different stocks. The "Enterprise" solution is to bu

My X (formerly Twitter) account is 17 years old. In internet years, that's ancient . For a long time, that history was a badge of honor. But recently, when I tried to pivot my focus from general tech to financials and SaaS growth, I realized that my histo