Yury Molodtsov

Developer-tool companies have a weird problem. The products that often earn them the most attention are the ones they give away. A framework, SDK, or open standard can reach millions of people before its creator earns a dollar from it. Adoption depends on developers trusting that the project will remain useful and responsive to the community. And after they succeed, the company must figure out how to make money. Vercel and Netlify show two ways to solve this problem. They entered the same…

Linear is an opinionated project management platform designed for high-performing software development and product teams. It was built as an opposition to JIRA, the “most hated software” ever created. In the survey by Gergely Orosz, Jira ended up as the most-disliked tool with more negative mentions than the next four combined. This happens a lot with enterprise B2B software because the decision-makers and users are different people. C-level executives decide to buy the tool that everyone else…

At 2 am in his parents’ basement, Tyler Denk drafted a message to Morning Brew cofounder Austin Rief saying he could not complete the work he had accepted. But he never sent it. A few weeks earlier, Rief had offered him $3,000 to build social-sharing and referral features for the young newsletter startup. Denk had done some coding, but he had never built anything like this. Still, he accepted. Now he was stuck fighting PHP and WordPress. In his latest retelling, he says he had 49 cents in his…

Unintended consequences are one of my favorite topics. I only wish politicians around the world felt the same. Most of them barely consider the immediate effects of their policies, let alone the second-order ones. They settle on a good‑sounding meme their audience likes and run with it. Years or decades later the consequences catch up but nobody takes the responsibility, even if it’s the same people in power. Governance is not exactly solved, but many recurring policy questions are no longer…

“There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania,” says The New York Times article titled “Lunacy in England” published in 1894. Moral panics are a recurring feature. They are bursts of exaggerated fear that some new thing will wreck society’s core values. The history of mankind is riddled with ideas that were once considered indisputable truths but now sound like a silly joke. With bicycles, doctors cataloged…

Today, AI is being framed as an entity that takes away things: jobs, chips, energy, water, or even creativity. Right as the major labs are about to go public. It has become such a divisive technology. Tech founders and executives love AI. Developers are split. There’s definitely a certain share of people who publicly despise it, ready to dismiss any piece of content that has a trace of artificial intelligence, even if they use it themselves. At the end of it, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are…

Strata is a new outliner app for MacOS that I’ve built. It’s completely native and only 2.5 MB. You can get it here. I wrote about outliners extensively in the past. An outliner is a text editor that organizes information in hierarchical nodes. You might have seen one if you ever used Workflowy, Dynalist, OmniOutliner, or Roam Research. Outliner is a superior tool for thought. I find them most useful when I have to organize a lot of information or draft a complex article without a clear idea of…

I’ve tried working in so many areas. I used to code and wanted to become a developer. I did a bit of design. I love photography. I did venture investing. The outcome of this is a career as a generalist. And being a little bit of everything sometimes felt like a disadvantage because the world rewarded the people around who went deep on something. It turned out the breadth was useful anyway. I could talk to anyone and translate the ideas between engineers, executives, and reporters. That’s what…

One thing that Safari does well is its Reading Mode. The people who built it are brilliant, and no other browser can truly match the beauty and seamlessness. But I prefer Dia (or any other Chromium-based browser to Safari, really). They don’t have it. Chrome presumably got an update, but so far, I’m still not seeing it. Which is why a few months ago, I built and released Readr, a reader mode extension for Chrome. I’ve been using it basically every day since then and made countless tweaks and…

This is Product Hunt’s main page today. 4 out of 5 places are taken by extremely large companies that need little promotion: Anthropic, Google, Cloudflare and Vercel. Product Hunt used to be a website I opened daily looking for cool new products. Some of them were just nice personal tools and some eventually grew into billion-dollar companies (I found Truebill there during their launch). But since then, it has turned into a marketing platform for big tech startups. Sometimes it’s genuine…

Over the last two months, I’ve done all my news reading through Syndicator. It’s an app I built, and I’m releasing it to the public now. Syndicator is a ranked, personalized reading app. It pulls news sites, blogs, YouTube videos and Substacks into one place, then learns from what you actually read, skip, save, and share.  Algorithms have a bad rep, but I 100% believe they can be fantastic when they’re optimized to help you. I don’t want the app to be “engaging”. I want you to open it, sca...

In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN. The Decline in Numbers News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now? Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while struggling to contain costs, which directly shapes their editorial policies. Practically all of them have put up paywalls to...

Bookmarking apps are a cursed category. So many attempts, so many failures. Remember Pocket? Omnivore? All buried under the sands of indifference. And I can see why. It’s a hard category to break through and an even harder one to make sustainable. Users want the service, but hardly anybody wants to pay for it. Readwise Reader, which I’ve used for the last 3 years, has achieved a lot, but it also costs a lot and still feels like opening an airplane control panel sometimes. Safari technically h...