I'm noticing a rapid growth in "weird" PRs. PRs that fix a problem in the most non-obvious way (when there ARE obvious ways to do it). I suspect it's LLM written but non-disclosed. I'm a big fan of code assistance but without an experienced driver the result is some real slop.

GitHub recently shipped a new Actions UI and it is a huge improvement. It's visually more pleasing but it's also way less laggy when viewing jobs with large amounts of output. Whoever did this, please do large PRs next, you're amazing. I'm an equal opportunity critic. I talk a lot of shit about GitHub (and continue to have a LOT of criticisms about the product), but I'll absolutely call out good work when I see it! Example: github.com/ghostty-org/ghost…

It felt like: Amazon - Shipping, quantity over quality. PMs wanted to just ship the new announcement at Reinvent. Microsoft - Revenue. They wanted to make money. Everyone does but Microsoft really highlighted it. Google - Technology. We wasted so much time circling about architectural stuff in partnership meetings. So confusing. This is all very reductive and my own opinion, but it's how I'd characterize it.

lol. Azure was actually the worst API to deal with. But Microsoft committed full time engineers to do it so... awesome! Google was the easiest, generally, once you defeated the auth boss. Amazon was wild because their APIs would vary so wildly across products.

Okay stupid story time cause it’s been long enough and I feel like airing dirty laundry today. One thing I found incredibly frustrating as an employer is you can’t share your side of the story when people are fired and you’re always painted as the bad guy. Here’s an extreme case. This was sometime between 2012 and 2022, just to keep this vague. I don’t want to deal with identifying anyone. And honestly I don’t even remember his name anymore. There was an employee we had that had a strong internet following as a neurodivergent person and advocate for women. One of the influencer types always fighting for the cause. He was also decently liked within the company and had a following within. We got a report he sent lewd comments to a female employee. As part of our investigation we pulled his corporate chat history and emails (well IT did and HR reviewed, I didn’t have access to that personally). And we found tons of lewd comments, photos, VIDEOS. To many female employees, not just the one who reported. Fired him that day. He took to Twitter and painted us as hating diversity, being terrible to women, abusing his neurodivergence, etc etc. Many rallied behind him. We could only sit and watch because we can’t just release private correspondence publicly and we didn’t want to get into a public argument. Haven’t heard from him in awhile. I think he left Twitter during the whole X thing because of social justice and all that. Of course. OF COURSE. Are corporations always in the right? Obviously not. Was I perfect? Surely not (but in this case I’m feeling pretty good). But also don’t trust one sided stories. What a stupid and frustrating experience that was.

I share this story with founders of enterprise software companies, it's one of my favorite sales experiences and I think highlights some of the important non-technical aspects of sales: I had just concluded a sales meeting with Very Large Company. This company had just publicly announced a huge commitment to Microsoft Azure. The year is 2015 or so, and Azure is still very much an up-and-comer, so as the meeting concludes I ask the executive that was present "I'm curious, why Azure?" (As someone selling cloud agnostic tooling, I don't care one way or the other, but I was curious) He says he'll show me on the way to the elevators. I consider that an odd answer to my question but go along with it. As we near the turn to the elevators, we reach a hallway "intersection", and he points the opposite direction and says: "you see this hallway?" It was a standard corporate office hallway with small private offices flanking both sides as far as the building went. He continues, "Every single person in this hallway is a Microsoft paid employee." And that's why they chose Azure. Because when something goes wrong, they don't have to submit a ticket or even call a phone number. They can literally knock on someone's door and get official, high tier support. That's how Microsoft closed the 9 or 10 figure deal (multi-year, can't remember exact) to get this large company to go 100% into their cloud. There's a lot of points to this story, but I think fundamentally the important thing is understanding the level of non-technical factors that lead to large enterprise deals.

A bunch of alternate icon choices are coming in Ghostty 1.1.1. 😍 You already have the ability to customize the colors of the default Ghostty icon, but these artist-drawn variants are super cool and will help make your Ghostty style more you.