Articles

Reading notes, reflections, and original writing.

Original Writing

• The Gap Between Domains

• What Chinese School Actually Taught Me

• What Content Creators Can Teach Us About Research Management

• Productivity Tools Introduction

• What Meta’s $80 Billion AR Bet Teaches About Asking Real Questions

• Why I Write in Public

Paul Graham Essays

• The Two Kinds of Moderate

• Charisma / Power

• After Credentials

• A Way to Detect Bias

• RAQs (Rarely-Asked Questions)

• The Patent Pledge

• Defining Property

• Airbnb

• An Alternative Theory of Unions

• Why Arc Isn’t Especially Object-Oriented

• Economic Inequality

• Jessica Livingston

• The Top of My Todo List

• Weird Languages

• How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

• The Hardware Renaissance

• The Future of Web Startups

• How to Be an Angel Investor

• How Y Combinator Started

• A Word to the Resourceful

• A Student’s Guide to Startups

• The Future of Startup Funding

• The Island Test

• Writing and Speaking

• How to Do Philosophy

• The Top Idea in Your Mind

• Why TV Lost

• The Equity Equation

• Six Principles for Making New Things

• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

• How You Know

• Programming Bottom-Up

• The Refragmentation

• The List of N Things

• The Roots of Lisp

• What Languages Fix

• Better Bayesian Filtering

• Design and Research

• The Hundred-Year Language

• Five Questions About Language Design

• A Plan for Spam

• Writing, Briefly

• The Venture Capital Squeeze

• How to Fund a Startup

• After the Ladder

• A Unified Theory of VC Suckage

• Java’s Cover

• Being Popular

• What Made Lisp Different

• Revenge of the Nerds

• Succinctness is Power

• What the Bubble Got Right

• Undergraduation

• The Submarine

• Hiring is Obsolete

• What Business Can Learn from Open Source

• Inequality and Risk

• The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

• How to Be Silicon Valley

• Why Startups Condense in America

• The Power of the Marginal

• Be Good

• A Fundraising Survival Guide

• Ramen Profitable

• What Startups Are Really Like

• Organic Startup Ideas

• The Acceleration of Addictiveness

• What Happened to Yahoo

• Investor Herd Dynamics

• How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

• What Doesn’t Seem Like Work?

• Why It’s Safe for Founders to Be Nice

• The Risk of Discovery

• Persuade xor Discover

• Alien Truth

• What You (Want to)* Want

• Billionaires Build

• The Airbnbs

• The Reddits

• Writes and Write-Nots

• The Best Essay

• The Shape of the Essay Field

• Good Writing

• What to Do

• When To Do What You Love

• How to Start Google

• Copy What You Like

• The Other Road Ahead

• Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

• Mind the Gap

• Ideas for Startups

• Why to not Not Start a Startup

• Holding a Program in One’s Head

• Taste for Makers

• Lies We Tell Kids

• Stuff

• How to Lose Time and Money

• Great Hackers

• The Age of the Essay

• Beating the Averages

• What You’ll Wish You’d Known

• What You Can’t Say

• Hackers and Painters

• Why Nerds are Unpopular

• Having Kids

• The Four Quadrants of Conformism

• Heresy

• Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?

• The Need to Read

• How to Get New Ideas

• What I’ve Learned from Users

• What We Look for in Founders

• Black Swan Farming

• Default Alive or Default Dead?

• Beyond Smart

• The Fatal Pinch

• What I Worked On

• Fierce Nerds

• Crazy New Ideas

• Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

• Schlep Blindness

• The Lesson to Unlearn

• How to Write Usefully

• Write Simply

• How People Get Rich Now

• Being a Noob

• Early Work

• A Project of One’s Own

• Startups in 13 Sentences

• Earnestness

• How to Think for Yourself

• How to Disagree

• You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

• Keep Your Identity Small

• Good and Bad Procrastination

• The Anatomy of Determination

• The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

• How to Work Hard

• Life is Short

• Cities and Ambition

• The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

• How to Convince Investors

• How to Raise Money

• How Not to Die

• Before the Startup

• Relentlessly Resourceful

• Mean People Fail

• How to Make Wealth

• How to Start a Startup

• How to Do What You Love

• Startup = Growth

• How to Get Startup Ideas

• Do Things That Don’t Scale

• Founder Mode

• Putting Ideas into Words

• The Right Kind of Stubborn

• Superlinear Returns

• How to Do Great Work

• The Top Idea in Your Mind

Joel Spolsky Essays

• Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

• Camels and Rubber Duckies

• Evidence-Based Scheduling

• Fire and Motion

• Human Task Switches Considered Harmful

• Strategy Letter V: Commoditizing Your Complements

• The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

• The Law of Leaky Abstractions

• Things You Should Never Do, Part I