Erik Bernhardsson

About   Resume   Top posts  

σ-driven project management: when is the optimal time to give up?

2022-04-05 Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think, which is a blog post I wrote a long time ago positing that software projects completion time follow a log-normal distribution. Read more…

Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled

2021-11-30 Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP): Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically leasing capacity in their data centers through an API. Other pure-software providers will build all the stuff on top of it. Read more…

What is the right level of specialization? For data teams and anyone else.

2021-07-23 This isn't as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day: I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different roles (data scientist, data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer etc) is generally a bad thing driven by the fact that tools are bad and too hard to use Read more…

Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story

2021-07-07 I guess I should really call this a parable. The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (~4 people) at a mid-stage startup (~$10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies. Read more…

Software infrastructure 2.0: a wishlist

2021-04-19 Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year! I love working with something that moves so quickly. Read more…

What's Erik up to?

2021-04-01 I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years, I ran the tech team, hiring 300+ people, probably doing 2,000+ interviews, and according to GitHub I added 646,941 lines of code and removed 339,164. Read more…

Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory

2020-12-16 It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I'm an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I've seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive. Read more…
Older Newer

Want to get blog posts over email?

Enter your email address and get an email (roughly monthly) when there's a new post!

Erik Bernhardsson

... is the founder of Modal Labs which is working on some ideas in the data/infrastructure space. I used to be the CTO at Better. A long time ago, I built the music recommendation system at Spotify. You can follow me on Twitter or see some more facts about me.