The Software Engineer Weekly

The Seniority Trap: Why You Might Have 1 Year of Experience, 10 Times

We’ve all seen the “Senior Software Engineer” LinkedIn profiles with 10+ years of experience. But in the world of engineering, time is a deceptive…

Apr 5 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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March 2026

3 Things I'm Unlearning from Big Tech

For nearly a decade, my identity was defined by a single title: Software Engineer. It’s an identity I picked up early, starting in a Computer Science…

Mar 29 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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How to Build a $1k MRR SaaS Without Getting Lucky

This week, Ferryman officially crossed the $1,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) milestone. It took 110 days of showing up every single day. No days…

Mar 20 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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Be Selective About Opinions

As you get older, you have to become aggressively selective about whose advice you let into your head. Early in our lives, we’re all standing on the…

Mar 15 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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3 Hard Truths I Learned From Being Laid Off

Nearly eight years ago, on March 20th, I woke up, walked to a coffee shop near Washington Square Park with Carly, and prepared for another Tuesday as a…

Mar 6 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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Stability is a Trap

Most of us enter the industry with a simple plan: go to a Big Tech company, build a financial foundation, gain some “prestige,” and then leave to build…

Mar 1 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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February 2026

Your Hours Worked Don’t Matter

When you first go self-employed, there is a massive internal pressure to fill every hour with “work.” When you don’t have a 9-to-5 schedule, being busy…

Feb 22 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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How I Use AI to Code

When I first started using AI to code, I did it sheepishly. I treated it like a gimmick or a slightly better version of Stack Overflow. But over the…

Feb 15 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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How I Built my SaaS to $600 MRR

Since my last update, Ferryman has crossed another milestone: we just moved past $600 in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). While the jump to $600 might…

Feb 8 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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January 2026

I Quit Google to Build a $10k MRR SaaS

Note: I am documenting my entire journey of building a successful, $10,000 MRR SaaS product from the very beginning. I just released the first video of…

Jan 31 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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3 Reasons to Ship Smaller Code Changes

One of the most underrated skills in software engineering isn’t writing complex algorithms, it’s the ability to break a complex problem down into small…

Jan 25 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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Don't Outsource Knowledge

We are living through the most significant shift in the history of software engineering. For decades, the job was simple in concept: a human provided…

Jan 18 • Kevin Naughton Jr.

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