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Happy Saturday!

Belated Christmas wishes to all you lovely people. Welcome to the nineteenth edition of this newsletter, the last for this year. 

I have been blogging off and on for over 15 years now, but never took it very seriously. I would get motivated, churn out 4-5 articles, then go back into hibernation for many months. Rinse. Repeat. Making a commitment to writing one article a week and publishing this weekly (for the most part) newsletter has been a revelatory lesson in discipline and consistency. 2020 has had a lot to look back and reflect upon in any case, so I will share some more coherent thoughts in the next week’s missive.

For all the ideas, comments, warnings of “Error establishing database connection” (ugh!), and especially for the notes telling me that what I was writing was useful and to keep going. I am deeply indebted to all of you. Thank you very much!

I wasn’t able to write anything new this week, but as usual, here’s some awesome stuff that better people wrote and I found interesting.

From the great interweb

1. Michelle Bu of the Stripe engineering team has published a record of the first 10 years of the evolution of the Stripe Payments API. If you are interested in payments, APIs, or programming in any way, this is a strongly recommended read.
2. Continuing on the API theme, Packy McCormick writes about strategic API play and the power it unlocks in his “Not Boring” newsletter. “APIs all the way down” is reminiscent of Steve Yegge’s API rant, both being strong reminders of the difference being API-first can make.
3. John Cutler’s article on the pitfalls of giving everyone their own project really hit home. My article on autonomy and too many small teams came from the same kind of non-team experience at Uber, but John expresses it better and with fewer words (of course).
4. If you are on a break and tinkering around with code, here’s a guide to writing good command-line tools.

That's it for this week folks. Have a great weekend and a very, very happy new year!

-Kislay