Adam Wiggins
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
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Adam Wiggins did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsTechnologies from our community - CRDTs, sync engines, universal version control, and good old-fashioned open protocols and file formats - can give a nation more independence and control over its own critical software infrastructure.
↗Politics and emotion at Local-First Confadamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsWe acknowledge that mainstream software will largely be the creation of big tech companies, and that's ok.
↗Politics and emotion at Local-First Confadamwiggins.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 8 weeks earlier
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Their wordsFollowing and subscribing are heavyweight signals, and thus suffer from the same problem of manually tuning rules and filters.
↗A Bluesky feed for oneadamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsA user's behavior, especially as it changes over time, is a better signal for what the user wants to see.
↗A Bluesky feed for oneadamwiggins.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsThe "homework problem" described above might be much worse in practice for end users who aren't motivated to invest in their email triage systems, even if it will save them time in the medium term.
↗Firehose authentic useadamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsbuilding a third-party client to read and route messages is a gray area in their terms of service, and perhaps only partially supported in their API surfaces.
↗Firehose authentic useadamwiggins.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsIt's a good example of how user preferences are much more subtle than broad heuristics like "all receipts go to FYI."
↗Email triage with an embedding-based classifieradamwiggins.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsPredictions were poor until I got to over 250 samples in the training set.
↗Email triage with an embedding-based classifieradamwiggins.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsLocal / open text embedding models work fine on consumer hardware.
↗Email triage with an embedding-based classifieradamwiggins.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 10 days earlier
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Their wordsExplicit filtering rules (e.g. rules features in many email clients): mostly a failure. It's too much work to set up and then manage these, especially since a given person's preferences will change over time.
↗Personal information firehoseadamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
Social media recommendation algorithms are only partially designed to serve the people using them.
Their wordsThe weak point of social media algorithms for end users is that they are only partially designed to serve us.
↗Personal information firehoseadamwiggins.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsThe baseline of user expectation quality and craft keeps rising.
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Their wordsAgentic and sync are natural complements because local-first is multiplayer by default, and agents are another sort of "player" in addition to human collaborators.
- 19 months earlier
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Their wordsany given business will find a small number of highly-effective channels, and the rest don't matter.
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Their wordsAfter that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people's lives.
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Their wordsYou need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.
- 3 years earlier
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Our reading
The Information Age could be a species-level shift comparable to the Industrial Revolution
Their wordsI find it plausible that the Information Age will be a species-level shift on par with the Industrial Revolution.
↗making computers betteradamwiggins.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsThe economic and intellectual horsepower in Silicon Valley and the wider tech world seems to be pointed away from these goals.
↗making computers betteradamwiggins.com 2nd of 2 in this piece