Author Archives: Mark

About Mark

Ten years into my journey towards becoming a pro systems programmer, sharing what I learn along the way. Also on Twitter: @offlinemark.

If you're reading this, I'd love to meet you. Please email mark@offlinemark.com and introduce yourself!

How to pick a market that will make you money

As a founder, picking your market is the most important decision youโ€™ll make. It will impact every aspect of your journey, from product development to sales, and ultimately determine how profitable youโ€™ll be. A good market compensates for poor execution on your part, while even the best execution will struggle with a bad one.

So what goes into a good market?

The key attributes are:

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Open source licensing for supervillains

This post covers my research into open source software licensing and my analysis of real-world open source projects that profit off of open source code via proprietary licenses.

Keep reading and you’ll learn:

  • What the difference between a restrictive and permissive license is
  • What dual licensing is and how you can use it make money off of open source code
  • What CLAs are and the specific clause your CLA needs for use with dual licensing
  • Examples of companies that implement dual licensing and how they do it

And of course: I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.


Let’s talk evil. And by evil, I mean money.

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Evergreen tweets

Twitter’s length limit is deceptive. At a glance, it suggests that writing tweets should be easy and quick. This is true for superficial tweets, but does not mean all tweets are written quickly and with little effort.

Twitter is actually a platform for concise writing, and writing concisely is harder than writing verbosely. There are certain tweets I spend a lot of time on and it’s shame to have them get lost in my feed. So I’m storing them here.

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Taking a gap year and working at a fast food restaurant

Most people thought I was crazy for doing this, but I spent the last few months of my gap year working as a short order cook at a family-owned fast-food restaurant. Here’s a short reflection on 2 things I learned from the experience as it pertains to my gap year. If you’re a programmer you’d probably be more interested in this post instead. Of course, I learned much more than this, but the rest is basic food service industry lessons that would be cringy to write about, so I’ll keep it to myself.

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