Ben Nelson

While some folks hire entire Figma design teams for their personal websites, I'm here at 6:30 AM explaining to my partner why I need a third coffee to "write stuff." 2022: "I'll share monthly insights about building companies!" 2024: checking it -> Writing consistency matches crypto winter performance 📉 But look - AI got better at English faster than I got better at writing. That's what we call product-market fit. New strategy for 2025 - Actually write 12 articles - Convince partner these dawn coffee raids are essential business ops Track my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://lnkd.in/e6bkkxvH P.S. If my partner reads this - yes, this is exactly what I'm doing at 6:00 AM either wiring or reading the book. Note: Will open source my coffee consumption metrics in Q3 2025. Full transparency, like web3 promised.

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If you are into Frontend development, this is a really cool survey: https://lnkd.in/g7scsiF9 A few highlights: - React is a clear winner with nearly 70% usage - Typescript is having a blast, which is great news (94% of frontend developers have used Typescript in the last year) - Majority of React users seem to use it together with Next.js - Angular seems to be going down - Node is the runtime of choice (96%), while Deno only has 2.6%

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A few updates from side project land: First - based on some feedback from testers regarding what they like best, I've built out the photo postcard sending feature from one of my other side projects (big days - push notification reminders for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) into a standalone app, snapmail. Snap a photo, and mail a 4x6 print to a friend anywhere in the U.S. for $2.99. It is really, really easy to use, and is now available on TestFlight. Second - lil baby tracker is now on the iOS App Store! Definitely the easiest way to track a newborn on the market (thoroughly dogfood-ed by yours truly). Pay a one time $.99 IAP and sync with another device automatically. Will drop TestFlight & App Store links in the comments, but you can check them out here too: https://tinylittle.app/

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🚀 Why iOS Architecture is Key to Building Scalable, Maintainable Apps 🚀 After over 13 years of working in iOS development, one thing is clear to me: great apps aren’t just about clean code—they’re about smart architecture. The structure behind the scenes can make or break your app’s future. Here's what I’ve learned about why architecture matters: 🔑 Scalability from Day One When your app grows, so does its complexity. Starting with a solid architecture like MVC, MVVM, or VIPER ensures your app can evolve without turning into spaghetti code. It’s like laying the foundation for a house—you want it to stand strong, even when you're adding new features. 🔄 Maintainability We’ve all inherited messy codebases, and there’s one thing we dread: making one small change that breaks ten other things. A well-architected app minimizes dependencies, making it easier for engineers to jump in, fix issues, and add features without fear. 🛠️ Testability A well-designed architecture is a testable one. Separation of concerns makes it easier to write unit tests, ensuring that your app works as expected without manually testing every possible scenario. Testing becomes faster, more reliable, and less painful. 🌟 Collaboration When working with a team, clear architecture means better collaboration. Everyone understands where things go and how different parts interact. A cohesive architecture standard makes onboarding new developers faster and keeps the project running smoothly. Architecture might not be the flashiest topic, but it’s the backbone of any successful app. Building with the future in mind—whether it’s choosing the right patterns, ensuring proper separation of concerns, or designing for flexibility—sets your app (and team) up for success. What architectural patterns have you found the most useful in your iOS projects? Let’s chat! 👇 #iOSDevelopment #MobileArchitecture #SoftwareEngineering #Scalability #CleanCode #Testability #MobileApps #TechLeadership #DesignPatterns #SoftwareArchitecture #iOS #SwiftDevelopment #CleanArchitecture #DevLife

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Excited to share a blog post from my team about modernizing Yelp's legacy billing system. Upgrading something this critical (without breaking things!) was a massive challenge, but we pulled it off with some creative thinking, teamwork, and a lot of learning along the way. The blog covers: 💡 The hurdles we faced while modernizing. 💡 How we kept things running smoothly during the upgrade. 💡 Lessons we learned that might help others tackling similar projects. Shoutout to the awesome team who made this happen—couldn’t be prouder! Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gZGKrEeP If you’ve had experience modernizing legacy systems, I’d love to hear your war stories or tips! #Teamwork #TechUpgrades #LegacySystems #YelpEngineering #Tenacity

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Product is fun, complex, messy, and there are no shortcuts. Once you accept that—and embrace it—amazing things happen to your career. Cat Hicks, PhD puts this better than anyone: "Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems What I mean is, sometimes it's really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it's often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It's one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff. What would it look like if we could ask, "how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving" instead of "how do I take away all these annoying hard problems." The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish."

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Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.

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If you really need multiple backend repos before you have multiple teams question whether you should be multiple companies. If not you’re probably better off as a monorepo if so you’ve got bigger concerns. At UpContent we’re actively retreating from the architectural complexity of micro-repos, as a smaller team it’s just unnecessary and most tech these days support multiple separately deployable components/services in a mono repo. Exceptions might be tiny services that don’t hit your main db and for whatever reason are in another language. People always forget that part of microservice architecture principles were separate databases and no shared code. People also forget they were a way for large companies to segregate duties with fully autonomous teams each owning a service not a strategy for startups with one team. Multi-repo is a very valuable tool in the tool box but it is one for after your first team split and when you process in place to handle cross team coordination.

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At Geisel Software, we’ve tackled some of the world’s toughest challenges - and the reason for our success comes down to one thing: **our people.** Great software engineers don’t just have a bag of skills. If you focus on finding someone who’s great at Typescript or React, you’re likely to find someone who’s…average. Why? Because most skills fall on a bell curve. The majority are in the middle. What sets great engineers apart isn’t their skillset, it’s their mindset. Great engineers: ✅ Think differently. ✅ Push themselves further and harder. ✅ See challenges as opportunities to innovate. At Geisel, we’ve shifted our focus to finding greatness in people. During our HR screens, we dig deep to uncover their potential, creativity, values, and drive. Once we find that greatness, we don’t micromanage. We give our team the freedom to grow, learn, and take risks. The results? Engineers who don’t just solve problems, but redefine what’s possible. When you bet on people, they’ll amaze you every time. What’s your approach to building a team?

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In case anyone wants the "low down" on what we're doing with LymanWealth. But I also want to add -- it's super fun! If you're looking for something more aggressive to add to your portfolio, you definitely should check us out. Note: not a full portfolio management or retirement strategy, should only be used with the portion designated for growth / high risk. May not be suitable for everyone. #investmentmanagement #wealthmanagement #automatedinvesting #automatedtrading #ria #etfs #investmentstrategy #stockmarket #stocks #indexinvesting #dca #dollarcostaveraging #alpha

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Tech debt causally harms cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market. You release a defect free, fully functioning piece of software that will *never change* but its code design is a mess. Would you care about tech debt? NO! Why? Because you don't need to change it. It works. It could be written in Whitespace or BrainF**k. Who cares. Nobody is going to look at it. What if it had a tiny change maybe once a year? How much would you care then? A bit more. Maybe Whitespace is ruled out but if it took a couple of days to work out what was happening would there be any business value in paying down the debt? 1 week of refactoring would take nearly 3 years before you break even. Not worth it. This isn't a hypothetical, I have built and maintained software which fits this exact scenario. When does the debt start to have a negative affect on cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market? Once a quarter? Once a month? Now imagine that you are making hundreds of changes a day. How much is that tech debt costing your business now? And this is assuming that the software is 100% bug free and perfectly functioning. Now extend that, you are making hundreds of changes a day and the internal quality issues are causing you to create bugs which has the knock on effect of harming the user and customer's productivity. Devaluing your product. What's the cost of that debt to your business now? As engineers we need to talk more about how we are protecting and investing in technology in order to reduce cost-of-change and meantime to adapt to market, rather than talk technical debt. Because if we don't need to change or change rarely, then technical debt is not a problem.

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I'll let you in on a little secret ... My #1 interview question when hiring new team members is “Tell me about a [….] you love and why” For a product position that could be “Tell me about a product you love and why” For an engineering position: “Tell me about a project you love and why?” For a marketing position: “Tell me about a marketing campaign you love and why? For an infodev position: “Tell me about documentation or product help you have used that you love and why?” This is a powerful question that allows interviewees to express their personal motivations/passions, critical thinking skills, and how they approach their work as a genuine conversation instead of a standard list of interview questions. 1. Reveals Passion and Communication skills By asking candidates to discuss something they "love," you give them an opportunity to express genuine enthusiasm, which can be an indicator of passion for their field. This is valuable in any role because passion often correlates with motivation and resilience. It also puts them in a place where they can show their best communication and persuasion skills. 2. Uncovers Depth of Knowledge The question invites candidates to dive deeper into what makes a product, strategy, or approach effective, giving insight into how well they understand their field. For example: Product role: It shows if they have thought critically about user experience, design, and functionality. Support role: It may reveal an understanding of customer psychology and empathy. Sales role: It highlights whether they grasp the nuances of successful sales tactics and customer engagement. 3. Shows Alignment with Company Values Candidates’ responses can reflect whether they value similar qualities as the company does, such as innovation, customer-centric design, or transparency. 4. Demonstrates Analytical Skills and Reasoning Asking “why” requires candidates to articulate the reasoning behind their choice. This sheds light on their analytical and critical thinking skills—qualities that are essential in any role but especially important in roles that require strategic decision-making. 5. Encourages Authenticity and Personal Expression This question is more open-ended and personal, allowing candidates to feel comfortable sharing their unique perspectives. This can lead to more genuine responses, which helps the interviewer get to know the candidate beyond rehearsed answers. 6. Assesses Creativity and Problem-Solving Approach Their answer can demonstrate creative thinking or innovative approaches they appreciate and potentially would bring to the role. In product management, for example, it can indicate a candidate’s capacity to think outside the box. This question is so versatile and strives to create a genuine conversation that explores a person's passions and experience over standard rapid-fire questions. Genuine conversation will always be better for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

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Dev agencies, if you don’t want to be treated as a commodity, stop acting like one. - Learn the business context for engineering needs - Stop squeezing your clients every opportunity you get - Prioritize transparency, communication, and accountability In short, position yourself as a partner that uses tech to solve business problems. You really can’t complain about being seen as a commodity if you treat everything as a transaction.

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Should senior tech leaders commit code? I'm not talking about tinkering in a sandbox or replit for fun. I mean to your company's live systems? I truly believe if you're going to support the people who work in tech, you have to know how that role feels. Not 10 years ago, Now. I believe all senior leaders in tech focused companies should attempt this at least once, tech background or not. Today I did a very simple PR, I had support and I was called out for using the wrong wording for review by one of our engineers 😍 (Which I LOVE, folks should feel safe enough to call you out!) but I did it. I really enjoyed it. A spark of what techie me used to feel flared up again. This is what got me into this industry. I was creating ❤️ Engineers were happy to critique me, and I value that, this is where they are the experts. No free pass for the director! Their comments were of course, correct 😍 I also felt the frustration of some of our processes (we've all got things that could be better!!) and with that visibility I can help drive change. I've challenged the whole engineering management team to do the same.(Phil Doyle, ☁️Andy 🔒 Bold, Anita Dreosti, Dean Stevens) Should senior leaders commit code? HELL YES!! A huge thank you to Paul Reardon for keeping me (and our company) safe and walking me through processes I'd not done before. I've had an awesome day 😎

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Startup425 will be hosting their "Eastside Summit" on August 1st at Bellevue City Hall during #SeattleTechWeek and you do not want to miss it! The Eastside Summit is hosted by Startup425 and its partner cities of Bellevue, Renton, Redmond, Issaquah, Kirkland, and Bothell. Join #Founders, #Investors, Executives, PolicyMakers, and those in bigtech and startups for a day of networking, education and community. There will be a series of panels around topics like... - Venture Capital & Startup Investments: Offers a deep dive into funding trends and investment strategies, providing attendees with crucial insights into the financial backbone of startups. - Eastside Startup Founder Exits: Successful founders share their exit strategies and experiences, offering invaluable insights for upcoming entrepreneurs. - Enterprise Technology on Eastside: Highlights the latest advancements in enterprise technology and their impact on both the local and global markets - Business and Technology Policy: Facilitates a dialogue on evolving regulatory frameworks to better support technological innovation and business growth Registrations have just opened.

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Tip for sales/bizdev folks in Linkedin: in your automated templates don't make it TOO OBVIOUS that you haven't looked into my profile and the company profile, but mention that you did. Like, "Hi Andrei, looked into Safe, it looks super sick! As a Senior Product Manager, you might be interested in our {completely irrelevant stuff}". Immediate red flag that will most likely lead to blocking (if I'm in bad mood). Putting some real effort might help you with conversion rates :)

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If you've ever had to deal with inconsistent UX, multiple generations of design systems, and the perpetual back and forth between UI and backend developers - there's hope, you are not alone. And let me just say it out loud - there's no "full stack" development - it is simply impossible for an engineer to stay up to date on all the development across JavaScript, frameworks, Node.js, Kubernetes, Java, etc. You either have deep and somewhat narrow, or broad and shallow. These problems are quite common for everyone who has inherited an existing product (which is like 99.9% of us). This blog post by Kyle Shevlin about building a tightly-enforced composable design system resonated with me. #UI #designsystem #react https://lnkd.in/gStEWHtC

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