Amjad Masad

I've always been fiercely competitive.

At the dawn of civilization, with the introduction of the agricultural revolution, humans needed to coordinate in larger numbers so the hierarchy emerged as the primary organizing tool.

Computers give humanity the power to solve some of the most critical problems our species has ever faced.

A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work.

I'm fascinated by the idea of computers doing The Right thing without explicit user input.

Running a growing business is thrilling.

It's normal to get excited by social media likes.

This website is hosted on an editor.

It's wild: Almost everything I worked on has become a great success on a global scale.

When a new thing is invented, we're often stuck with the old words to define it.

This post was generated by gpt-3.

Kids are always telling themselves stories.

I was asked to give a toast in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Mother of All Demos so I spent some time reflecting on Engelbart's work.

Have you ever wondered why the less "pure" a scientific field is, the less progress we've made?

Progress in technology happens incrementally; it's hard to imagine inventing the cellphone without inventing landline telephones first.

I was born to immigrant parents.

Where I'm from "Thank God" is something you say every day.

Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10% chance to win $95 and a 90% chance to lose $5?

The notion of progress in programming is -- as in anything else -- debatable and hard to define.

[This essay is an adaptation of my talk at Active Ingredients Conference] It's never been better for programmers, a team of 5 today can build projects and companies that required hundreds if not thousands of engineers just a few decades ago.

It's now fashionable to call yourself a "minimalist", but is that merely about not having things?

I'm typically forward looking and barely take time to reflect (not to say those two things are mutually exclusive).

Earlier this year I spent a lot of time thinking about what "impact" means to me.

My problem is that I'm a perfectionist -- Everbody As I finished writing the title for this post I thought about quitting.

Last year at an internal talk at Facebook I was fortunate to see John Carmack speak about his idea generation system.

It's fascinating to me how something that can be described so simply can also be tricky to implement.

After operating under the radar for a while, we're now publicly launching the repl.it code evaluation API that allows anyone to execute code in whatever language from anywhere on the internet.

Two unrelated things happened recently: A few high profile open source maintainer burnouts1 I've been reading a lot of philosophy2 I was first introduced to Stoicism by a friend who recommended the book A Guide to the Good Life.

In a series of experiments, researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or "disfluency" and cognition.

We're about to introduce async functions internally at Facebook so I'm taking the time to reflect on how this could be a great win for building reliable software.

You can now embed runnable code snippets from repl.it on your blog or website.

After I prototype an app I'm building, my time is split between the editor and the browser with the console open.

tl;dr I built a JavaScript VM and debugger in JavaScript.

There are many challenges in implementing a language VM in JavaScript.