I’ve been writing this blog daily for almost two years. A look at how my ideas have changed and what I was completely wrong about (90% of everything is crap). I’m a person that needs to learn via first principles, so doing is the most effective way for me to improve.
- Remote Developer Environments never caught on.
- Microsoft and Google turn Notion and Airtable into Commodity SaaS. Didn’t happen. Tables (by Google) and Loops (by Microsoft) have effectively stalled.
- “How to Beat Google Search” — I had written about GPT-J two days before and didn’t make any connection between search and LLMs.
- An overarching thesis about the securitization of everything. I connected this to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century with my Ownership in the Twenty-First Century. It still might happen, but it’s not here today.
- VPN as a developer tool. The ecosystem of applications on top of WireGuard never caught on.
- Agent vs. Agentless architecture in distributed systems. Sidecar agents are still the easiest way to do things.
- Platform teams quickly disappearing. I didn’t explicitly say this anywhere, but I’ve incorporated it in many places. The gist: most internal platform abstractions are net negative productivity. The reality is: platform teams are probably more widespread than ever.
- SSH as less relevant in the cloud. In fact, new frameworks like mrsk by DHH use SSH as a central technology. So never bet against Lindy technology.
- Observability at the edge — Good idea, but hard to implement in practice.
- MicroSaaS — Not completely wrong on this, but most of it was a Zero Interest Rate Policy phenomenon
…and many more.
Things I was right about but didn’t take advantage of (probably worse than being wrong!)
- Buying IPv4 Addresses. IPv4 prices have just about doubled since I wrote about it. Owning a small block would have been fun (and profitable)!
- ELO Rating. I forget why I wrote about this topic, but I never connected it to the idea of ranking models. Now it’s useful for model evaluation.
Things I was right about (but in the wrong way)
- Meta and Zuckerburg’s tenacity. I was never fully convinced by Meta’s metaverse strategy, but I thought it was refreshing to see a founder-led strategy that was bold and contrarian. Turns out that the metaverse was the wrong strategy at precisely the wrong time, but Zuckerberg was able to correct the course. As a result, they are doing some of the most important open work in AI.
The jury is still out on:
- Is AWS a Dumb Pipe? In the current AI revolution, I think we will get the answer.
- TypeScript for Infrastructure. It’s happening, but innovation is slowing.
- Apple’s Ads business creating competing incentives between its unique privacy position and a new business.
- MLOps and DevOps Convergence. I wrote this about my work on the last AI stack, but the jury is still out on whether this plays out for the LLMOps stack.