carmenhchung

Sometimes I see startups waxing lyrical about how they're helping the little guy by sticking it to the big corporates / the boomers / the Government / the [insert hated flavour of the month]. It's almost the equivalent of the modern company .

If this is you, hear me out.

Any time you market yourself as a messiah, or as someone fighting for the little person against the tyranny of someone else, you inevitably put yourself on a pedestal (how high will depend on how far you're able to push that message).

If you can stay up there, good for you...but it can be a long fall from the top if things go awry.

I wrote a post here recapping the Gamestop saga and how the app Robinhood went from the people's champion to their whipping boy: https://thisweekintech.substack.com/p/robinhood-men-in-headbands

It's a long read, but I'm hoping it'll make us all think twice about our messaging (note: I don't mean mission - that can, and should be, as lofty as you like).

I recently wrote a blog post on how we halved our memory consumption, and drastically increased speed, in our Ruby on Rails app just by switching to jemalloc: https://medium.com/rubyinside/how-we-halved-our-memory-consumption-in-rails-with-jemalloc-86afa4e54aa3 If anyone has any thoughts, or other tips for performance optimisation, please do leave a comment!