Bryan Byrne

February 16, 2024

Shipping Well Resources (2024 Edition)

“Shipping solves everything” is a product development motto I deeply believe in. I’d rather ship the wrong thing and learn than to not ship. It becomes increasingly difficult to ship well as a company grows––process and communication taxes tend to slow shipping down. Here is the content I recommend to help teams ship well no matter wha...
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February 4, 2024

Campfire once again proves less is more

On the weekend that everyone is reacting to the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, I decided to test out a different product, Once Campfire, a chat service from 37Signals with a twist. Instead of paying a monthly subscription you pay $299 once and host the service yourself (how it used to be). Just as the Vision Pro will lead us to rethin...
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November 25, 2023

Peopleware right again: OpenAI's problems are sociological in nature

Peopleware, the seminal book about Productive Projects and Teams, is based on the premise: “The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” OpenAI's recent challenges have proven the authors, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, correct again. OpenAI is a company creating groundbreaking technology th...
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August 25, 2023

Writing more to meet less

Team alignment leads to autonomy, which leads to individual and collective fulfillment. Zoom fatigue and the cost of unnecessary meetings are well documented scourges to knowledge worker fulfillment but there is an antidote, greater writing discipline. Teams struggle to achieve sufficient alignment by overly relying on real-time commun...
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August 22, 2023

Most impressive product of week: AirTags

Having AirTags in luggage is a game changing experience. Last week I had the unfortunate experience of having a flight canceled and had to extend my trip by a night. This meant passing through Canadian customs to reclaim my checked bag. Since my bags weren’t arriving from a flight, there was no signage telling me where my bag would be....
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March 28, 2023

Shipping API libraries will be fully automated by AI

If you are unfamiliar with APIs, "What is an API" might be helpful pre-reading. My recent open sourcing of api-sports, a ruby gem that simplifies usage of the API-SPORTS.io sports data API, clarified for me that the well documented and repetitive nature of API library creation makes it a perfect use case for AI automation. It can be he...
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February 16, 2023

Betting odds formats and open sourcing "oddx"

TL;DR: I was unfamiliar with American "Moneyline" odds formatting and open sourced oddx to simplify switching between formats (e.g. +300 » 3/1). Until recently I was unfamiliar with American "Moneyline" sporting odds (e.g. +300). Having grown up in Ireland I'm much more familiar with "fractional" presentation of odds (e.g. 3/1 aka "3 t...
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January 19, 2023

The five rules of dog ownership, according to Jameson.

Halloween was a real life nightmare for me last year. I had to say goodbye to Jameson, my thirteen year old Yellow Labrador and best friend. The sense of loss is intense and I’ve been reflecting on what Jameson thought me about dog ownership. Rule 1. Train early and often. Compound Interest has been described as the eighth wonder of th...
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October 19, 2022

Wordle, clarifying that less is more.

“What product impressed you the most last week?” is a question I’ve asked myself for some time. In January 2022 the answer was obvious, “Wordle – A Daily Word Game". At the time I answered: “Wordle has taken the world by storm and is incredibly elegant. It's so successful that when you Google “Wordle” you see a doodle emulating Wordle’...
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