Writing

In addition to my regularly updated blog and my active LinkedIn feed, I also write a column for The New Stack about entrepreneurship for engineers.

My way-back-background is in journalism, and I still often take a journalist’s approach to my writing. So you’ll see a mix of my own observations and ideas mixed with interviews and thoughts from founders, investors and operators in the world of open source startups.

Here’s some of my writing:

After the Docker Free Team Episode: How to Sunset a Free Feature. An awkward topic especially for open source founders: if you put a feature in your open source project that you later realize you should be getting money for, how minimize the backlash when you move it?

4 Lessons about Revenue: I’m all about revenue. This article was a write-up of some important lessons about revenue from a panel on the topic at State of Open Con, 2023.

Is your startup in trouble? I started working on this article right around the SVB failure… and no one wanted to talk about startups in trouble. But actually ‘head in the sand’ is not a good strategy, and this article talks about both how to spot signs of trouble and what to do about it.

Is the startup grind really necessary? A fun topic to cover, with both a dose of realism (yes, sometimes you’ll work a lot), countered with some maturity (the times you work a lot are probably because you fucked up your planning).

Making Open Source Pay: All about monetizing open source.

How Do You Tell Your Story? A lot of my work centers around storytelling clarity, something that is often overlooked by technical founders but really critical, even in a pure open source context. Positioning is about building the backbone of your story, and also about choosing what story you tell about your project/product, because there are many options.

How to Write a Better README Mission Statement. A lot of mission statements in READMEs suck. MY mission is to improve the average quality of READMEs so users can waste less time and projects can get more users.

I’ve also written some more in-depth, more technical pieces for The New Stack, such as:

Trust No One and Automate (Almost) Everything: Building a Modern Zero-Trust Strategy. An in-depth dive into the why and the how of building zero-trust systems. I said promised something technical, but the point of the ebook ends up being that zero trust is a process and a strategy, not a piece of technology.

The State of State: New Approaches to Cloud Native Storage for Developers. Probably totally out of date by now, but still a good read on the options for cloud native storage.

That’s just a small sampling, check out all my work for The New Stack here.

Work with me

Are you the founder of an open source company struggling to figure out your revenue model, make your existing revenue sources more profitable or position your project and product(s) in the market? We should talk.