Notes from the messy middle.
What we’re learning as we design, build, and ship: opinions we’ve earned the hard way, practices that hold up, and the occasional honest postmortem.
Showing all 34 posts
- 2026
- 2025
Working with Robots, Volume 1
Designing Agents That Stop and Ask for Guidance
Winter '24 Recap
Business development in the off-season: reconnecting, reflecting, and planting seeds.
Trust and Alignment in Sales Driven Software Companies
FeaturedHow to foster trust and alignment in fast growing b2b software companies
Scalable Web Scrapers
Exploring the best tools for scalable, cost-effective web scraping solutions.
New Codebase Onboarding
FeaturedStrategies for Efficiently Learning a New Codebase
Pitching the Refactor
Language is the liquid that we're all dissolved in. Great for solving problems, after it creates a problem.
Slack Development Lessons - Part 2
Insights from our Foray into Slack App Development
Fall '24 Recap
Sometimes you grow by choice, sometimes by necessity. This fall we did both.
Sunk Cost
FeaturedEven though you're the captain of your destiny, you don't have to go down with the ship.
Software in the Winter
Most things that grow have a period of dormancy. What about our software?
- 2024
Slack Development Lessons - Part 1
Navigating Slack's Unique Development Environment
Marginal for Slack
Rebuilding Marginal as a Slack Application
Building an Audience
How to grow your audience by 900% in just 70 days.
Advice
What it means to tell someone else how to live their life
Culture and Code: The Hidden Parallels
Uncovering the striking similarities between company culture and system design.
Company Culture: All Hype or Actually Worthwhile
Refine how you think about and manage your team's culture to transform it into a valuable asset.
Feeding Our Hungry Followers
Delivering Fresh Content Straight to Your RSS Reader
Marginal Improvements
We're re-imagining Marginal as a Slack-first experience. Learn about our focused approach to exploring this opportunity over the next six weeks.
Working in Cycles
New products should start as skateboards, but there comes a day when you have to build a rad electric car.
Marginal
How to build a simple Rails CRUD application in just two years
Lessons in Consulting - Part 3
The Fruits of Your Labor
Summer '24 Recap
Filling a bucket one drop at a time takes a while, but you still end up with a full bucket.
Lessons in Consulting - Part 2
Key Challenges and Common Pitfalls
The Go Between Summit
Why it's important to take a break from your daily routine and appreciate the value in good old fashioned human connection.
Lessons in Consulting - Part 1
Launching Advice
Software Engineering for the Present & Future
What does it mean to write software that just barely executes?
The Right Kind of Lazy
Is your laziness an asset or an impediment to your career growth?
Effective Context Switching
Mitigating brain malfunction when switching from one task to another.
Pull Request Structure
Entice your fellow developers to review our work through the use of cute gifs (and other, better, tips).
The Opinion Zone™
An Origin: it's your responsibility to share knowledge with folks but it's better to be nice about it.
Musicbox
Failing to foster human connection through technology
Hello World
We're Go Between
These notes come out of client work.
See what shipped in the case studies