"Exit the haunted forest" is an excellent discussion of the software-engineering / programming topic of "technical debt" and the oft-feared "rewrite".

From @IncrementMag's "Software Architecture" issue in 2020.

increment.com/software-archi… A few select quotes I enjoy (mostly because they resemble my own experiences, including my own time as a young programmer):

Something I think a lot about nowadays as a CTO-turned-product-manager is what I've started to shorthand as the "product surface area" problem. I'll explain what I mean in this thread. (0/n) 1/ There are four ways your company can end up:

a. Lots of engineers, small product surface area
b. Few engineers, small product surface area
c. Lots of engineers, large product surface area
d. Few engineers, large product surface area

Let's take a quick moment to talk about the famed "build vs buy" argument that specialized tech vendors often hear from customers.

For example, I'll occasionally come across prospective customer who says, "We're debating whether to license your software, or roll our own." I'll start w/ cloud costs. We spend >$1million per year in cloud costs. We're a ~25-person tech team serving ~350-400 enterprise customers. Our aggregate cost is lower due to economy of scale.

But *your* cloud cost, alone, to "roll your own" is likely higher than our TCO to you.

"Beyond Entrepreneurship" is a very good book for managers of growing startups to read. amazon.com/dp/0133815269/…

It is a book written *for* entrepreneurs at the post-initial-success, pre-scale stage. Reed Hastings once said he thought every entrepreneur should memorize the book. The basic premise of the book is this: whereas entrepreneurship is about discovering a market need and servicing it with an initial product, company leadership is altogether different. What made you successful at the former will not necessarily make you succeed in the latter.