Co-founder and CTO at Flowstate. Writing about building products, startups, AI and engineering leadership.https://willhackett.com/en[email protected] (Will Hackett)[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/some-things-never-change/https://willhackett.com/some-things-never-change/The browser wars settled into a three-horse race. The AI race looks suspiciously similar — three players, scrappy upstarts, and one kid in the corner sucking on a jar of glue. Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:10:00 GMTWill Hackettaiopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/lessons/https://willhackett.com/lessons/In 2012 Scott Weiss wrote that the best preparation for becoming a founder is working at a startup. Fourteen years and several failures later, here are the seven lessons I wish I'd actually listened to — on people, product, ownership, failure, and knowing when to step away from the keyboard. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:50:00 GMTWill Hackettstartupscareerleadership[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/enable-nestloop/https://willhackett.com/enable-nestloop/Postgres' WindowAgg node doesn't propagate cardinality estimates. That single bad estimate can poison every downstream join decision. Sometimes the pragmatic fix is the right one. Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/workforce-engineering/https://willhackett.com/workforce-engineering/Every discipline starts the same way. People do the work for years before anyone thinks to define it. Workforce Engineering is the discipline of deliberately designing, measuring and optimising how an organisation deploys its labour to produce outcomes. Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:35:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalproduct[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/just-use-postgres/https://willhackett.com/just-use-postgres/I needed to store massive OpenTelemetry data for AI spend analysis. Instead of reaching for BigQuery or Snowflake, I pushed 67,000 telemetry events per second into Postgres on a MacBook Air, while running analytical queries against it, to prove the boring choice scales. Sun, 22 Mar 2026 07:49:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalinfrastructure[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/amortising-a-hallucination/https://willhackett.com/amortising-a-hallucination/We are currently adjusting our EBITDA to account for a sophisticated parrot that read the internet. Gartner says $2.52 trillion in global AI spend this year — yet only 14% of CFOs report clear ROI. Sequoia's 6:1 services-to-software ratio means the problem is about to get six times worse. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:00:00 GMTWill Hackettaibusinessfinance[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/ai-sor/https://willhackett.com/ai-sor/AI agents won't hollow out systems of record. But the platforms that fight agent access with rate limits instead of embracing structured protocols like MCP will lose to the ones that don't. Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:00:00 GMTWill Hackettaibusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/age-verification-digital-id/https://willhackett.com/age-verification-digital-id/We have a digital identity problem. Not because verification technology can't inherently be private, it can. But, because governments are asking the wrong question. Governments ask "how do we identify people?" when what they should be asking is "how do we verify claims without identifying anyone?" Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:00:00 GMTWill Hackett[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/fastmail-to-microsoft/https://willhackett.com/fastmail-to-microsoft/After years with Fastmail, we switched to Microsoft 365. Spam filtering, EU data residency, and ecosystem integration made the difference. Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/eu-open-source-sovereignty/https://willhackett.com/eu-open-source-sovereignty/The EU sees open source as the path to digital sovereignty. They're right. But adoption without sustainable funding just means Big Tech keeps extracting value from European developers. Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMTWill Hackettopinionbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/engineering-teams-turn-on-a-dime/https://willhackett.com/engineering-teams-turn-on-a-dime/Why fluid planning beats rigid quarters, and how the best CTOs build cultures that adapt without chaos. Mon, 05 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/agentic-coding-workforce/https://willhackett.com/agentic-coding-workforce/AI coding tools have crossed a critical adoption threshold. But the real shift isn't individual productivity—it's how engineering organisations allocate capacity across priorities. Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 GMTWill Hackettaibusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/reclaiming-the-commons/https://willhackett.com/reclaiming-the-commons/On the case for moving away from anonymous "ghost" accounts toward a pragmatic internet—one where we can protect the vulnerable without silencing the dissident. Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:00:00 GMTWill Hackettopinionsociety[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/cost-of-ai-inference/https://willhackett.com/cost-of-ai-inference/Exploring historic AI model prices, and Google's new Gemini 3 Flash at $0.50/$3.00 per million tokens—a 67% increase over 2.5 Flash. Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:20:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalai[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/big-teams-small-team-energy/https://willhackett.com/big-teams-small-team-energy/It's IEEE Spectrum time again, so it's time to talk about why adding management layers early is the real problem behind $2 trillion in annual software failures. From Canada's Phoenix payroll system to the UK Post Office's Horizon fiasco. Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusinesstechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/ai-search-crisis/https://willhackett.com/ai-search-crisis/Google's AI Overview recently told users that astronauts met cats on the moon. It suggested adding glue to pizza to stop cheese sliding off. For a brief period in early 2025, it claimed we were still in 2024. These aren't edge cases—they're symptoms of a much larger problem that's quietly dismantling the internet's economic foundation. LLMs are fundamentally breaking the internet's business model. Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:31:00 GMTWill Hackett[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/making-flowstate/https://willhackett.com/making-flowstate/So you're spending 20 million on engineering. What are you getting for it? Software engineering organisations struggle to answer basic questions about costs, and PE scrutiny is changing the game. It's more important now than ever to treat engineering like the investment it is. Wed, 05 Nov 2025 15:00:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalproduct[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/fixing-email-spam-with-ai/https://willhackett.com/fixing-email-spam-with-ai/89% of malicious emails bypass SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Your inbox is already compromised—authentication protocols failed and nobody told you. Here's how AI catches what traditional filters miss. Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:00:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalai[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/pragmatic-sunset/https://willhackett.com/pragmatic-sunset/Reflections on building Jamie, an AI assistant for email, and the decision to wind down Pragmatic after not finding product-market fit. Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/analytics-fine-tracking-problem/https://willhackett.com/analytics-fine-tracking-problem/Analytics is curiosity about what works. Tracking is surveillance. I run Umami on Vercel with Neon Postgres for zero-cost, banner-free analytics. The irony? My joke LLM needs consent, but tracking 16,000 visitors doesn't. Sun, 12 Oct 2025 11:30:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/ai-everywhere/https://willhackett.com/ai-everywhere/The tech industry's rush to embed AI into every product is creating exhausted users and half-baked features. Real AI success comes from solving specific problems, not sprinkling chatbots everywhere. Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:50:00 GMTWill Hackettaiopiniontechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/ai-economics/https://willhackett.com/ai-economics/AI is cheap for end-users right now, but only because venture capital is picking up the tab. The reality is that training and inference are still expensive, and someone has to pay. Billions raised by OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and others are spent on compute, staff and Nvidia GPUs. Consumers see subsidised pricing, but the underlying costs are enormous. Fri, 26 Sep 2025 22:52:00 GMTWill Hackettaibusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/web-4-0-pragmatic-internet/https://willhackett.com/web-4-0-pragmatic-internet/My take on the next version of the web given the failures of Web 3.0 and the need for a more organised, user-centric approach. Wed, 27 Aug 2025 01:40:00 GMTWill HackettTechnicalAI[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/berlin-airport-reflections/https://willhackett.com/berlin-airport-reflections/Reflections on meeting a team of scrappy, multi-faceted engineers and what makes the best startups work Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/whatsapp-and-tonic/https://willhackett.com/whatsapp-and-tonic/A tale of 6,000 f-bombs and one accidental victory. What started as a simple integration for Jamie turned into a deep dive through WhatsApp's encryption, the Signal Protocol, and eventually finding a simpler path through DOM scraping. Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:22:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/emotional-ai/https://willhackett.com/emotional-ai/What if your AI assistant could actually feel what kind of day you're having? Not in some creepy sci-fi way, but in a structured, measurable way that makes it respond like a human would—with actual understanding. Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:44:00 GMTWill Hackettaimachine learningtechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/avoid-reinventing-the-wheel/https://willhackett.com/avoid-reinventing-the-wheel/How switching from a broken WordPress site to Luma transformed It's Culture Innit's event management, proving that buying beats building when software isn't your core value.Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:45:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/know-your-geebos/https://willhackett.com/know-your-geebos/Essential principles for defining Generic Business Objects (GBOs) in your system architecture to avoid expensive re-engineering and maintain clean data models.Fri, 20 Jun 2025 21:38:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/the-cloud-call/https://willhackett.com/the-cloud-call/A founder's warning about why early-stage startups should ignore cloud vendor sales calls and keep infrastructure simple to preserve runway and focus on shipping product.Thu, 19 Jun 2025 20:20:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/captcha-pissing-off-old-people/https://willhackett.com/captcha-pissing-off-old-people/How unnecessary CAPTCHAs, cookie prompts, and popup modals are driving customers away from websites, with practical advice on reducing friction.Thu, 29 May 2025 20:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusinessopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/invest-in-integration/https://willhackett.com/invest-in-integration/Why VCs should back focused tools that integrate well with existing platforms instead of chasing the next monolithic unicorn that tries to do everything.Thu, 08 May 2025 16:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/how-to-actually-get-things-built/https://willhackett.com/how-to-actually-get-things-built/Why product teams need to embrace simplicity over complexity, focusing on clear blueprints and agility rather than endless documentation and rigid processes.Fri, 02 May 2025 16:00:00 GMTWill Hackettbusinesstechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/uk-vs-aus-pensions/https://willhackett.com/uk-vs-aus-pensions/A detailed comparison of UK pensions versus Australian superannuation, highlighting how Australia's mandatory 11% employer contributions, lower fees, and better returns outshine the UK's restrictive system.Sat, 29 Mar 2025 09:03:00 GMTWill Hackettopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/getting-started/https://willhackett.com/getting-started/A reflection on how web development has evolved from the simple FTP upload days to today's complex ecosystem of frameworks, security concerns, and over-engineering.Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:00:00 GMTWill Hackettopiniontechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/bunny/https://willhackett.com/bunny/A review of BunnyCDN as a European alternative to Cloudflare, highlighting its strengths in Edge Rules and constraint-driven development approach.Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:26:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/apple-email-is-not-good/https://willhackett.com/apple-email-is-not-good/A detailed investigation into iCloud Mail's filtering failures, broken rules system, and unresponsive support that led to missed contracts and a migration to Fastmail.Tue, 25 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/one-bad-hire/https://willhackett.com/one-bad-hire/The worst kind of bad hire isn't the one who does nothing, it's the one who creates chaos to justify their existence. A single bad hire can become cultural rot, fracturing teams, slowing delivery, and driving away top talent through bureaucratic chaos and toxic behavior. They make your team turn off.Fri, 21 Feb 2025 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/tinfoil-hat/https://willhackett.com/tinfoil-hat/A tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory pondering whether Cloudflare's ubiquitous presence as a CDN, DNS provider, and certificate authority could be the perfect cover for surveillance.Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:41:00 GMTWill Hackettopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/b2c-product-thoughts/https://willhackett.com/b2c-product-thoughts/Why the most successful B2B SaaS products like Canva, Shopify, and Notion started as beloved consumer tools before conquering enterprise markets.Sat, 08 Feb 2025 20:25:26 GMTWill Hackettbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/cloudwrap/https://willhackett.com/cloudwrap/Building a DIY screenshot sharing solution using Cloudflare R2, Workers, and Siri Shortcuts as an alternative to CleanShot X's cloud features.Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:20:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/jira-in-2025/https://willhackett.com/jira-in-2025/A frustrated rant about JIRA's clunky interface and poor user experience after switching back from Linear's elegant project management.Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:00:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnicalbusiness[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/operational-transformation/https://willhackett.com/operational-transformation/Recently talking with a company that needs to provide real-time collaboration within their application, I started to think about the problem. Operational transformation (OT) and conflict-free replicates data types (CRDTs) are solutions to this problem. Wed, 01 May 2024 05:45:00 GMTWill Hacketttechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/rebase-techniques/https://willhackett.com/rebase-techniques/I often see developers merging main into their feature branches and opening pull requests (PRs) that include commits from other branches. This practice leads to "git spaghetti," which has several consequences. But it's easy to learn to be better.Sun, 24 Mar 2024 05:52:40 GMTWill Hackettgitprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/jamie-ai/https://willhackett.com/jamie-ai/Jamie is a project I embarked on to build a human-like virtual assistant that I could CC on emails to take care of my admin. It was originally going to be Open Source, but I've decided to make it into a product.Thu, 15 Feb 2024 14:00:00 GMTWill Hackettmachine learningedge computegpt[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/share-encrypted-short-form-data/https://willhackett.com/share-encrypted-short-form-data/Sharing large amounts of data over short-form mediums like QR codes or NFC tags can be challenging. The data needs to be encrypted to ensure confidentiality, but packing useful data into a small space is difficult. Mon, 24 Jul 2023 12:02:00 GMTWill Hackettprogrammingsecurityencryptioncryptography[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/s2s-trust/https://willhackett.com/s2s-trust/In Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) the "services" are the fundamental building blocks of your application. Authenticating requests between services is a challenge. Fri, 14 Jul 2023 22:30:00 GMTWill Hackettprogrammingsecurity[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/edge-ocr/https://willhackett.com/edge-ocr/Running models closer to your users can be a huge win for performance and cost. Here's an experiment in running OCR on the edge with Cloudflare Constellation. Sun, 02 Jul 2023 22:30:00 GMTWill Hackettmachine learningprogrammingedge compute[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/react-compose/https://willhackett.com/react-compose/Straightforward solution for composing a bunch of React Provider components to avoid excessive nesting.Tue, 10 May 2022 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettsnippetprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/cloudflare-bind/https://willhackett.com/cloudflare-bind/Cloudflare's UI for managing DNS records is nice, but this method can help you import larger batches of changes faster.Mon, 11 Apr 2022 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettsnippet[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/git-rebase/https://willhackett.com/git-rebase/I'm a member of a few software teams and, very frequently, we commit code to our main branch. Common themes within my teams are not to have a develop branch or even release cycles. I practice rebasing instead of merging to keep my branch fresh.Sun, 18 Jul 2021 01:12:43 GMTWill Hacketttechnical[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/distributed-compute/https://willhackett.com/distributed-compute/Being an avid user of Apple's products, one of the standout features that I enjoy is the on-device processing of my personal data. Be it searching for an image, or Siri suggesting a calendar event based on a flight in my email, it's extremely useful.Fri, 09 Jul 2021 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettopinion[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/grocery-store/https://willhackett.com/grocery-store/This coding challenge is part of a series I will be posting for TypeScript & Golang, although it can be completed in other languages. As these are used for internal recruitment purposes, I recommend that you keep repositories with this challenge.Wed, 07 Jul 2021 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/distributed-token-invalidation/https://willhackett.com/distributed-token-invalidation/Building fast systems can be tricky and distributed computing is often the approach taken to improve performance.Sat, 08 Feb 2020 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettsecurity[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/unit-testing-in-keystone-js/https://willhackett.com/unit-testing-in-keystone-js/How to implement Mocha & Chai unit testing in Keystone JS.Thu, 30 Jun 2016 11:12:43 GMTWill Hackettjavascriptprogramming[email protected] (Will Hackett)https://willhackett.com/lets-encrypt/https://willhackett.com/lets-encrypt/Let's Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority that's serious about democratizing SSL on the internet. The team at Let's Encrypt is making TLS more accessible by validating certificates without the need to pay the likes of Comodo or DigiCert.Sun, 10 Apr 2016 01:12:43 GMTWill Hackettsecurity[email protected] (Will Hackett)