The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Zach Holman

zachholman.com

Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

Essays / personalEngineering management / careersSociety / politics / economyEngineering blogs

’10’15’20’25
Posts
141 from 1 Oct 2009 to 27 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://zachholman.com/atom.xml

2026 7

  1. You Should Have an LLC
  2. As Someone Who Has Written This Blog Post,
  3. Probably Won’t Pass You on to Another Investor
  4. The Cold Email
  5. There’s No Minimum Angel Check Size
  6. Signed: A Portfolio for Investors
  7. The Tools of Angel Investing

2025 5

  1. Taking Money off the Table
  2. Shipping Calendearing
  3. Losing Money is the Point
  4. Nontraditional Red Teams
  5. From Cold DM to Owning a Soccer Club

2024 2

  1. Send More Investor Updates
  2. Announcing Tifo

2023 1

  1. Hacking FIFA World Cup Rosters

2022 2

  1. How to Name a Startup
  2. The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with Times

2021 1

  1. How does Angel Investing?

2020 2

  1. My Favorite Tweet
  2. Write Angry

2018 3

  1. Double Shipping
  2. None of My Apple Gear Connects Together, Dammit
  3. A Stack Story

2017 10

  1. Staying Productive as a Solo Founder
  2. The Depression Thing
  3. Isolated Integration Tests in Shell
  4. JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript
  5. Women in the Room
  6. Three Quotes from Early GitHubbers
  7. How to Start Up Your First Startup
  8. Slow Exits Are Fucking Up the Valley
  9. Extracting Value as an Employee
  10. Publicly Dogfooding Your Culture

2016 8

  1. Kicking the @realdonaldtrump Beehive
  2. Working Remotely in Cafes and Possibly Even Surviving
  3. Bring in the Goddamn Adults Already
  4. The New 10-Year Vesting Schedule
  5. Evaluating Delusional Startups
  6. How to Deploy Software
  7. Startup Interviewing is Fucked
  8. Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window

2015 15

  1. Opt-in Transparency
  2. Dev Evangelism
  3. Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly
  4. Diffing Images on the Command Line
  5. Utter Disregard for Git Commit History
  6. Just Don’t Hire 0x Engineers
  7. Saying No to Sales
  8. Pretty Unmistakeable
  9. Fired
  10. This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition
  11. The Correct Floor Plan For Your Startup
  12. Don't Break the Streak Maybe
  13. Post-Publicity Personalities
  14. You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement
  15. How GitHub Writes Blog Posts

2014 9

  1. Inertia
  2. The Easily Amused's Guide to Searching GitHub Issues
  3. Keeping a Journal
  4. A Day of Communication at GitHub
  5. Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
  6. Startups, Mad Men, and Missing Out
  7. Travel Rewards for Lazy People
  8. Who Owns?
  9. GitHub's Public Speaking Culture

2013 7

  1. wat the wtf do programmers use as debug strings?
  2. This Machine Rebases Branches
  3. Inbox Zero, Everything Zero
  4. Bugfixes as Therapy
  5. You Won't Regret Positive Feedback
  6. The Conference Circuit
  7. You Suck at Retina

2012 7

  1. Chat Trumps Meetings
  2. Left: A Jekyll Theme
  3. Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac 👑💩
  4. How to Screencast Your Talk
  5. What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking
  6. How to Survive Tech Conferences
  7. The Apple Voice

2011 28

  1. Women Should Do Startups
  2. From "Hack" to "Popular Project"
  3. Swearing
  4. Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
  5. Slide Design for Developers
  6. Scaling GitHub's Employees
  7. Customer Support Doesn't Have to Suck
  8. Glue Languages Make You a Better Coder
  9. How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important
  10. How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous
  11. How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit
  12. How GitHub Works
  13. Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You
  14. Blog Marketing for Ego-Centric Assholes
  15. Improving Yourself is Easy
  16. Parallaxing Parallax on iOS
  17. The Most Important Code Isn't Code
  18. Fame
  19. Open Source Doesn't Just Market Itself
  20. Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects
  21. Your Talk Looks Like Crap
  22. OS X Isn't for Developers
  23. I Liked It When Quick Bars Got Me Drunk
  24. Winning San Francisco's Startup Scene
  25. New Apple Patent Shows iPhone 6 Dispensing Ice Cream
  26. Graduated with a Major in Startups
  27. OAuth Will Murder Your Children
  28. Automating Inefficiencies

2010 30

  1. Reputation: kind of a big deal
  2. Text Snippets. Boom.
  3. Steal the Code
  4. Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0
  5. My Favorites From Rails Rumble 2010
  6. Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
  7. A Nike+ Importer for Garmin
  8. How to Discover Your Music
  9. Dotfiles Are Meant to Be Forked
  10. Apple OnLine 4.0
  11. Enslaving Branches: How GitHub Does Enterprise
  12. Is that the new iPhone with the antenna thing?
  13. Web Apps Aren't Apps
  14. Androidvertising
  15. The Clean Slate
  16. Rebuild Facebook
  17. Apple is Petrified
  18. Gizmodo
  19. Cloudy With a Chance of Clients
  20. The Soloist
  21. Your Ad Blocker Probably Blocked This Post
  22. The Human is a RESTful Client
  23. Boastful, a new tweetback library for your blog
  24. The Future of iTunes
  25. Legacy Migrations in Rails
  26. iPad Ambiguity
  27. Immeasurably Improve Your Life by 34 Percent
  28. Simplifying Rails Controllers with named_scopes
  29. WiiFailure™
  30. Getting Real. Real Tasty.

2009 3

  1. Because 11Mbps is better than 10Mbps
  2. More Logical File System Organization with iTunes 9
  3. Positioning Apple

Undated 1

  1. The Video of the Talk on Talks