For the past two months, I’ve been using Cora, a website that connects to your Gmail and handles all of your email for you. Cora automatically organizes, labels, and archives your email. It then sends you a morning and afternoon digest with your emails to review.| bthdonohue.com
One of my goals this year is to teach myself Machine Learning.| bthdonohue.com
I’ve been observing a growing shift toward a more Closed Web. At the core of this change appear to be fundamental shifts in the value exchanges between web publishers and technology platforms.| bthdonohue.com
Matt Ranney, a Principal Engineer at DoorDash, recently gave an interview called Microservices are Technical Debt. I had the opportunity to work with Matt at DoorDash, and we had a lot of conversations on this topic 1. Are microservices technical debt? I was strongly in the less-but-better-microservices camp at DoorDash. Like many things, there’s a balance to be struck. Microservices 2 are critical to any web-scale system. That said, when you start to microservice all the things you tend to...| Brian Donohue – Makin’ that Instapaper
Today Instapaper launched Summaries, which is a feature I’ve wanted to build for a long time. Summaries help readers both understand an article before reading it, and help them recall the details of previously read articles.| bthdonohue.com
After almost 8 years in big tech engineering leadership1, I’m taking the leap to go full-time on Instapaper (again!)| bthdonohue.com
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, my startup failed. We had run out of money, everyone was laid off, and I ran down my personal savings trying to make it work. I needed a job as soon as possible, and there was only one place I wanted to work: betaworks.| bthdonohue.com
In 2020, our organization at Pinterest led the company in hiring from underrepresented backgrounds. Pinterest had set engineering-wide hiring goals of 25% women and 8% underrepresented engineers. Our organization vastly exceeded those goals, hiring 63% women and 25% underrepresented engineers in 2020H2.| bthdonohue.com
Recently, I’ve been spending time exploring Ethereum/web3 with the goal of trying to understand the technologies and opportunities. Having spent most of my career building in web2, my entire concept of building has been based on centralized systems. I’ve found that thinking about building in a decentralized ecosystem is really foreign.| bthdonohue.com
When building products, there’s a tension between building something quickly versus building something high quality. In order to build good products, it’s important to balance velocity with quality. At certain phases it’s appropriate to build it “quick and dirty”, in others it’s important to take time to create polished, high quality experiences. I’ve seen a number of cases where people struggle to create this balance, which produces low quality products. Here’s when I think i...| bthdonohue.com
Five years ago today, I smoked my last cigarette. Previously, I smoked a pack a day for ten years. Time for a bit of reflection on that. I always enjoyed this quote from Choire Sicha on his article about stopping smoking:| bthdonohue.com
As a manager, I spend a lot of time with people discussing their career goals. Ambitious people want to see forward movement in their careers, which most often translates to “getting the bigger role”. That might mean promotion, becoming the team tech lead, switching to management, or growing into a manager of managers.| bthdonohue.com
While sheltered in place, I finally had the time to do something I’ve been meaning to do for years: migrate Instapaper’s email service from Mailgun to Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES).| bthdonohue.com