How Dropbox is moving from AI tools that assist engineers to agentic systems that can execute scoped tasks, and how we’re building platforms to support those workflows.
#productivity
16 posts
28 May
21 May
Coding agents are giving everyone decision fatigue
Stack OverflowWith much of a software engineer’s time moving from writing code to structuring prompts and reviewing code, the workday is getting denser and more intense. Can AI solve the problems it's causing? …
20 May
Years of productivity-focused design are now visible in the data. Pragmatism has been central to Kotlin’s design from day one. The language prioritizes the developer’s convenience and productivity over academic purity or feature ambition. Developers describe working in Kotlin in a fairly consistent way: more time spent on what you’re trying to build, less time […]
20 Apr 2020
Over the past few years I have been participating in Stand-up meetings and it took me some time to find a convenient and effective way for keeping notes about what I was doing every day. I needed to be able to: keep notes on the issues I worked on, the meetings I participated in and stuff that blocked my work…
21 Oct 2019
Fitbit has discontinued their Fitbit One step trackers, which seems like a good opportunity to step back and reflect on wearing one for the last decade or so. I’ve enjoyed using Fitbit trackers, but the One devices seemed like they broke down too often. I’m pretty proud that I ended up earning all the activity-related […]
26 Jun 2019
Email communication is not my favorite but since I can’t avoid it, I am trying to compose messages in a way that I think it makes it easier for both me and the recipient: to quickly address what is being communicated avoid misunderstandings save time Here are some tips. They don’t apply to all type of messages, I provide before…
6 Mar 2018
https://medium.com/media/eef39ea5e8f053ef3fc7a6a272b9e093/href My co-worker Fabs recently wrote an article about how he get’s work done , which inspired me to write down my recent learnings about my own productivity. In the last year, I discovered different aspects of work life had a differently strong influence on my ability to work. In discussions with varying friends of mine, it became clear to…
22 Jan 2018
Last week, I passed my one year anniversary as head of the US Digital Service (USDS). So when Mr. Money Mustache asked for an interview, I was delighted to talk about some of the work that the USDS does. If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Money Mustache, he writes about a philosophy of badassity in […]
20 Mar 2017
A few weeks ago I was asked by a friend, “why should I care about Go”? They knew that I was passionate about Go, but wanted to know why I thought other people should care. This article contains three salient reasons why I think Go is an important programming language. Safety As individuals, you and I may be […]
14 Nov 2014
I recently had a web page with a long list of Twitter names that were not linked, like @mattcutts. I thought that someone has to have made a Chrome extension that would “linkify” names so they would be clickable like @mattcutts. And with a little bit of searching, I found twlinkfy. It looked like a […]
13 Nov 2014
One trick that I’ve discovered pretty recently for my 30 day challenges is based on advice from Jerry Seinfeld. The idea is that you get yourself a cheap calendar and a red pen. Every day you complete your daily challenge, you can cross that day off with a satisfying swipe of the red pen. Once […]
16 Dec 2013
I’ll keep it short: this week when you donate for cancer research, I’ll match your donation (up to a limit of $5000 total for all donations). We’ve already raised almost $8,000 dollars to help stop cancer, but I’d love to get to $10,000 or even higher. If anyone has ever wanted to take money out […]
26 Sept 2013
Someone recently asked me how I manage my to-do list, so I thought I’d write up the software that I use. Fundamentally I use Google Tasks as the backend, but with extensions and apps that improve on the basic functionality in Google Tasks. Chrome I use a couple different extensions for Chrome: – Better Google […]
3 Sept 2013
Some relatives were visiting this past week, so my inbox has a triple digit backlog. That’s after aggressive pruning of mailing lists and so on. Nearly all of those emails mention me in a “to:” or “cc:” line and request a response. Some observations: – roughly 40% of those emails are from the outside world […]
13 May 2013
This is a “hairball” post you can ignore. However, this post does trace my thinking about how to scale webmaster communication. Part of me wants to start answering questions I get via email by stripping out the identifying information and then replying with a blog post. Instead of one person getting a single reply, everybody […]
A quick “hairball” post about how sometimes it’s better to just go with the flow. I like how xkcd made this point with a chart of whether it’s worth the time to fix something that’s bugging you. I have a friend who is mechanical engineer. A few years ago he took me for a tour […]