Findings, April 2026
Products, games, books and links
- I watched Company Retreat. The bits for the audience are a bit odd but they continue to find the all around nicest folks to star on this show. It felt like it happened a lot faster than the previous show but still overall a good watch.
- https://www.aprilcools.club/ - I like this idea of just writing about things you like that you're not typically writing about. There's a tech 'theme' to this blog for sure but it seems nice to write about other things from time to time. I missed the chance for the 'April' part of it but I'll keep it in mind.
- https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-companies-on-a-20month-tech-stack - This reminds me of the many posts on boring technology. I think now that there are so many folks building apps for the first time it's worth spreading the message that you don't need a multi-region Kubernetes cluster to launch your product. Arguably, you probably never do.
@smitec - areyougoingexponential.rhys.dev
@smitec has 1,898 contributions on GitHub. Elliot Smith’s GitHub contributions are up 383% over the last 6 months.
There's probably a little bit of missing data on this one as I spent a couple of years on Gitlab and Bitbucket but it certainly confirms that these last few months have had a lot of output.
- I read 'The Goal' over a weekend this month on the back of a recommendation. I enjoyed it. I like the whole 'business novel' format over the traditional 'padded out blog post' setup. It reminds me of 'The Five Dysfunctions of Team'. I do think the ending was a little abrupt though.
Things I'm working on
I have two projects (outside of my professional life) that I am currently working on. They're not ready for a link just yet but in short:
- Three close friends and I have been running a weekly goals / check-in group for about five years now, inspired by this post: The Elephants. We've been hosting it on a free WordPress instance but it has given us trouble lately so I figured it was a good project to tackle. It's a pretty simple app that's a combo of blog posts and tracking goals in a spreadsheet.
- I'm working on a headless ticketing system similar to zendesk but built to be embedded into your own application. I've found more and more businesses operate over email and there's plenty that can be done to make that smoother. This one has a healthy sprinkle of AI functionality in it as well. I hope to have an alpha version out this quarter.
In case you missed it (my posts)
Web Scale has changed.
Writing an application that supports millions of users is much more difficult than writing one that supports hundreds. Historically, B2B SaaS apps aimed to grow big enough to need to worry about supporting that many users. Thousands of companies with thousands of employees. Having done that work gave you a
Elliot Smith
Spreadsheets and Disposable Software
A trend I am seeing, and experiencing, is an increase in disposable software. Software that does a little thing, for a little while and then gets deleted. No long term plan for maintenance or support. Like everything, there’s positives and negatives to the change. Overall I see more software going
Elliot SmithI’m long on software engineering
Somebody asked me recently if I thought we would need more or less software engineers in the future. If it wasn’t obvious form the title my answer was ‘more’. They were asking in the context of AI code generation but my feelings on the matter apply fairly broadly to any
Elliot Smith