Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.
Temporal is an open-source implementation of durable execution, a development paradigm that preserves complete application state so that upon host or software failure it can seamlessly migrate execution to another machine. Learn how it works or dive into the docs.
Replay is a three-day conference focused on durable execution. Replay 2024 is September 18-20 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Get your early bird tickets or submit a talk proposal!
Are you a software developer? Take Stack Overflow’s annual survey about how you learn and level up, which tools you’re using, and which ones you want most. You can check out the results of previous surveys here.
OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that does the heavy lifting of discovering and distilling information into a coherent answer. It encompasses three modules: Enhanced Search, an upgraded search experience; Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code, an IDE extension; and Auto-Answer App for Slack, which automates access to essential team knowledge.
His scroll art project introduces beginners to programming by letting them turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.
Al joined us from a retreat at the Brooklyn, NY-based Recurse Center, which offers free, self-directed retreats for programmers. Learn how to apply here.
PyCon US 2024 is May 15-23, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Read Eira’s two-part series about developers with ADHD here and here.
Chris recommends that devs with ADHD employ a “second brain” to help them track and remember information. Read Eira’s article on what second brains reveal about how we work.
A few years back Chris joined us to talk about the most lightweight web “framework” around: VanillaJS. Listen to the episode.