Electron turned “write once, run anywhere” into a reality for desktop dev - but it also brought “ship an entire Chromium with every app.” If you’ve got Slack, VSCode, AND Discord open right now, that’s practically 3 browsers running in parallel. No wonder your laptop's become a jet-engine 🚀

1/5: The biggest risk to your startup isn’t running out of money - it’s you giving up. If the grind is miserable, burnout creeps in and kills momentum. But there’s a powerful antidote: fun. Here’s why making your work enjoyable can keep your vision alive:

3 years ago, I went from coding every day to managing an engineering team—and I had no clue what I was doing at first. The biggest realization? My core “deliverable” was no longer code. It was context.

[1/7] “Don’t die. Don’t grind yourself into burnout.”

I’ve been reflecting on the lessons from @bryan_johnson's Netflix documentary—where he relentlessly experiments with slowing aging. It reminds me of engineering teams pushing productivity to the extreme.

Let’s talk about high-impact engineering—the kind of work that blows away normal timelines and delivers massive results. Sometimes it gets called “10x,” but the name doesn't matter: it’s about finding the biggest problems and tackling them with ruthless focus.

Will AI transform—or threaten—the per-seat SaaS model? I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI might reduce the size of teams, which could cut into seat-based subscription revenues. Here’s why it matters:

1/8 Ever thought about randomly deleting one of your own teammate's accounts to test onboarding? Sounds wild, but I've been doing - daily for years - and it’s surprisingly effective.

Should SaaS startups offer on-prem? I get asked this all the time about Graphite. My answer is usually “Yes—but only at a really high price.”

TIL that BitBucket initially only supported Mercurial.

ChatGPT’s new “work with apps” feature hints at a future where our everyday tools blend into a single, universal interface. Instead of juggling multiple editors or copy-pasting between apps, imagine guiding an AI agent that seamlessly handles everything.

1/ Early in my career, I believed in crafting aspirational company values - beautifully worded, on-brand, but often hard to recall or apply. At Airbnb, I saw this firsthand. Over time, I learned that truly meaningful values aren’t invented at a whiteboard; they’re uncovered through real experiences.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of stacked pull requests and AI-generated PRs. Stacked PRs break big changes into small, reviewable steps - already a proven way to ship faster and more reliably

gregmfoster.substack.com/p/stacking-a...

Just checked out Amazon’s Q Developer and GitLab’s Duo. They sound impressive - AI coding, test generation, CI/CD fixes - but honestly, we’ve seen these moves before (Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, etc.)

gregmfoster.substack.com/p/amazon-q-a...

Is ChatGPT Pro too expensive for developers?

Probably my favorite code review fact is, as far as I know, Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) coded the first web GUI-based code review system as a Noogler project.

gregmfoster.substack.com/p/from-fagan...