Ryan Madden

Summary: To lose weight, reduce your calorie consumption (mostly by reducing carbohydrate intake) until your 7-day average bodyweight declines at ~0.75% of your bodyweight per week.

With regard to builds, a cohort of companies using agents are leaping across the Bazel ROI boundary.

Previously: Faketorio: an agent testbed and Towards beating Factorio autonomously A few weeks ago, my friend Sam and I hooked Claude Code up to Factorio and let it try to beat the game.

I’ve recently become enchanted with the idea of beating Factorio autonomously.

Faketorio (GitHub) is a toy agent sandbox that I built this weekend with Codex.

I want to take a minute, amidst the Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex hysteria, to capture some of the currently-open questions about AI progress and its impact on software engineering.

This is part four of a multi-part series on lessons I learned while working as a software engineer at Google.

Disclaimer: These are my views, not my employer’s; I have no relevant non-public information.

Most companies have little interesting to say on the subject of leadership.

What follows is a transcript of Daniel Yankelovich’s speech “The New Odds”, given at the Marketing Strategy Conference of the Sales Executives Club of New York on October 15th, 1971.

The actual definition of a ‘meme’ is an idea that is optimized to spread from person to person.

Teams building closed-source software benefit from working in a high-coordination, high-obligation environment.

Daniel Yankelovich coined the term ‘McNamara fallacy’ on October 15, 1971 during a speech titled ‘The New Odds’ at the eleventh annual Marketing Strategy Conference of the Sales Executives Club of New York.

In the 2010s, cloud computing enabled a new way of managing servers famously characterized as ‘cattle, not pets’.

Broad generalizations (‘people don’t like being interrupted’, ‘men are taller than women’) invite a certain type of tiresome objection where the statement is disputed based on anecdote (‘that doesn’t bother me’, ‘my best friend is six foot four’).

There are a lot of advantages to a ‘thin client’ developer experience where your code is edited and run on a VM somewhere in the cloud.

When describing a change in a percentage, always be clear whether you are referring to percentage change or percentage point change since there is usually a large difference between these two interpretations.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein Git is great for building open-source software – its model of version control gels wonderfully with the needs of open-source maintainers and contributors.

Happy 20th, Git!

I am obsessed with an answer that Steve Jobs gave in a 2007 press conference.

A lot of businesses make a lot of money selling software that users hate.

Chess enjoys a unique reputation as a ‘thinking person’s game’.

“A moment’s thought would have shown him.

What is rational choice?

Look, I get it – you hate your users!

This is part three of a multi-part series on lessons I learned while working as a software engineer at Google.

This is part two of a multi-part series on lessons I learned while working as a software engineer at Google.

This is part one of a multi-part series on lessons I learned while working as a software engineer at Google.

This is part zero of a multi-part series on lessons I learned while working as a software engineer at Google.

At a difficult time in my life I discovered three rules which helped me to manage my thoughts and emotions.

This is a brief discussion of three patterns that limit the success of large organizations: the McNamara fallacy, the Peter principle, and the Preventable Problem Paradox.

This is a trivial math point but I’ve found it’s a useful tool for analysis in other areas.

Web3 In case your Twitter feed has not succumbed to the Web3 hype wave, I will quote a reasonable definition from Slate: Web3 refers to a potential new iteration of the internet that runs on public blockchains, the record-keeping technology best known for…

Mobile Apps I want to tell you a story about your phone and the software that runs on it.

Inside Alright we really have to talk about Bo Burnham’s Inside.

Wunderlist What happened to Wunderlist?

Tether About two months ago we talked all about Bitcoin.

Substack Substack is a blogging and email newsletter platform.

Google v.

Bitcoin Alright, fine, here we go: A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

A $500,000,000 checkbox Oops: A federal judge has ruled that Citibank isn’t entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August.

What is going on here I have thought for a while that I should write more.

In the early-to-mid 2010s a drinking game called Caps gained prominence at Northwestern University.