Zach Holman

Zach Holman

More about Zach →

Angel investor? I built Signed for you. Turns out angels deserved real software. Check it out →

Zach Holman is a founder and investor in San Francisco.

Anyway, here's a bunch of shit I've written.

2026

Jul 29

May 1

There’s No Minimum Angel Check Size

Mar 24

Signed: A Portfolio for Investors

Feb 27

The Tools of Angel Investing

2025

Oct 30

Taking Money off the Table

Sep 29

Shipping Calendearing

Jul 21

Losing Money is the Point

Feb 3

Nontraditional Red Teams

Jan 30

From Cold DM to Owning a Soccer Club

2024

Aug 28

Send More Investor Updates

Apr 11

Announcing Tifo

2023

Oct 11

Hacking FIFA World Cup Rosters

2022

Dec 19

How to Name a Startup

Feb 12

The Kobayashi Maru of Comparing Dates with Times

2021

May 13

How does Angel Investing?

2020

Nov 17

My Favorite Tweet

Nov 11

2018

Aug 8

Double Shipping

May 29

UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?

Feb 13

None of My Apple Gear Connects Together, Dammit

Jan 12

2017

Nov 20

Staying Productive as a Solo Founder

Oct 11

The Depression Thing

Aug 14

Isolated Integration Tests in Shell

Aug 8

JavaScript for People Who Hate JavaScript

Jun 27

Women in the Room

Apr 11

Three Quotes from Early GitHubbers

Mar 22

How to Start Up Your First Startup

Feb 15

Slow Exits Are Fucking Up the Valley

Feb 10

Extracting Value as an Employee

Jan 10

Publicly Dogfooding Your Culture

2016

Dec 19

Kicking the @realdonaldtrump Beehive

Dec 15

Working Remotely in Cafes and Possibly Even Surviving

Dec 12

Bring in the Goddamn Adults Already

May 9

The New 10-Year Vesting Schedule

Apr 28

Evaluating Delusional Startups

Mar 16

Mar 1

How to Deploy Software

Jan 28

Startup Interviewing is Fucked

Jan 8

Fuck Your 90 Day Exercise Window

2015

Oct 12

Opt-in Transparency

Oct 12

Oct 1

Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

Jul 24

Diffing Images on the Command Line

Jun 4

Utter Disregard for Git Commit History

May 19

Just Don’t Hire 0x Engineers

May 7

Saying No to Sales

Mar 31

Pretty Unmistakeable

Mar 12

Even More Emoji Abuse 🚧🚨

Mar 6

Feb 9

This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition

Jan 23

The Correct Floor Plan For Your Startup

Jan 22

Don't Break the Streak Maybe

Jan 21

Post-Publicity Personalities

Jan 20

You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement

Jan 19

How GitHub Writes Blog Posts

2014

Oct 16

Oct 3

Move Fast and Break Nothing

Aug 25

The Video of the Talk on Talks

Jul 28

The Easily Amused's Guide to Searching GitHub Issues

Jul 21

Keeping a Journal

May 16

The Talk on Talks

Mar 14

A Day of Communication at GitHub

Feb 26

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

Feb 13

Startups, Mad Men, and Missing Out

Jan 17

Travel Rewards for Lazy People

Jan 15

Jan 13

GitHub's Public Speaking Culture

2013

Nov 14

How GitHub (no longer) Works

Nov 6

wat the wtf do programmers use as debug strings?

Sep 4

This Machine Rebases Branches

Aug 6

Inbox Zero, Everything Zero

Jul 25

More Git and GitHub Secrets

Jun 18

Bugfixes as Therapy

Apr 29

You Won't Regret Positive Feedback

Apr 22

The Conference Circuit

Apr 11

Mar 28

If Only I Knew This Shit in College

Mar 28

GitHub: Behind the Feature

Jan 7

You Suck at Retina

2012

Dec 12

Chat Trumps Meetings

Dec 11

Left: A Jekyll Theme

Nov 20

Open Source Misfeasance

Oct 12

The Product is the Byproduct

Sep 20

Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac 👑💩

Sep 14

Unsucking Your Team's Development Environment

Aug 6

How to Build a GitHub

Jun 21

How to Screencast Your Talk

Jun 19

What They Don't Tell You About Public Speaking

May 22

Git and GitHub Secrets

Apr 27

How to Survive Tech Conferences

Apr 19

Aggressively Probing Ruby Projects

Feb 29

Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase

Feb 25

Feb 2

The Apple Voice

Jan 26

2011

Dec 12

Women Should Do Startups

Nov 23

From "Hack" to "Popular Project"

Nov 9

Nov 7

Stories From a Music-Fueled Distributed Streaming Bender

Nov 7

Nov 2

Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

Oct 24

Slide Design for Developers

Sep 28

Scaling GitHub's Employees

Sep 21

How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub

Sep 7

Customer Support Doesn't Have to Suck

Sep 6

Glue Languages Make You a Better Coder

Sep 2

A Documentation Talk

Aug 18

How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important

Aug 17

How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous

Aug 16

How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit

Aug 15

How GitHub Works

Jul 27

Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

Jul 21

Blog Marketing for Ego-Centric Assholes

Jul 20

Improving Yourself is Easy

Jul 19

Double-Shipping Software for Profit

Jul 1

Parallaxing Parallax on iOS

Jun 8

Jun 7

The Most Important Code Isn't Code

May 13

Apr 18

Open Source Doesn't Just Market Itself

Apr 4

Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects

Mar 21

Your Talk Looks Like Crap

Mar 10

OS X Isn't for Developers

Mar 4

I Liked It When Quick Bars Got Me Drunk

Feb 28

Winning San Francisco's Startup Scene

Feb 21

New Apple Patent Shows iPhone 6 Dispensing Ice Cream

Feb 7

Graduated with a Major in Startups

Jan 25

OAuth Will Murder Your Children

Jan 3

Automating Inefficiencies

2010

Dec 14

Reputation: kind of a big deal

Nov 25

Text Snippets. Boom.

Oct 28

Oct 21

Facelette: On TechCrunch in Three Hours and $0

Oct 17

My Favorites From Rails Rumble 2010

Sep 24

Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

Sep 13

A Nike+ Importer for Garmin

Sep 7

How to Discover Your Music

Aug 20

Dotfiles Are Meant to Be Forked

Aug 10

Apple OnLine 4.0

Jul 28

Enslaving Branches: How GitHub Does Enterprise

Jul 18

Is that the new iPhone with the antenna thing?

Jun 17

Web Apps Aren't Apps

May 26

Androidvertising

May 23

The Clean Slate

May 8

Rebuild Facebook

Apr 27

Apple is Petrified

Apr 17

Apr 6

Cloudy With a Chance of Clients

Apr 3

Mar 6

Your Ad Blocker Probably Blocked This Post

Mar 1

The Human is a RESTful Client

Feb 13

Boastful, a new tweetback library for your blog

Feb 5

The Future of iTunes

Jan 30

Legacy Migrations in Rails

Jan 27

Jan 24

Immeasurably Improve Your Life by 34 Percent

Jan 20

Simplifying Rails Controllers with named_scopes

Jan 18

Jan 17

Getting Real. Real Tasty.

2009

Nov 30

Because 11Mbps is better than 10Mbps

Nov 10

More Logical File System Organization with iTunes 9

Oct 19

Positioning Apple