Elena Petkovska

Elena PetkovskaSep 27, 2025

You’re using a keyboard from 1873 designed to slow you down. The layout we use today was literally designed to make you less efficient. Letters like A, S, D, F ended up under your weakest fingers. The most common letter in English (E) got relegated to your middle finger instead of your strongest index finger. Christopher Latham Sholes had a problem in 1873. His typewriter kept jamming when people typed too fast. Adjacent letter bars would collide and stick together. His solution? Deliberately slow down typists by placing commonly used letter pairs far apart. That’s how QWERTY was born. On the other hand, in the 1930s, August Dvorak created a keyboard layout optimized for human hands, not mechanical limitations. The Dvorak layout: • Puts 70% of keystrokes on the home row (vs. 32% for QWERTY) • Alternates hands naturally for common letter combinations • Places vowels under your left hand, common consonants under your right • Can increase typing speed by 40% with significantly less finger strain So why are you still using QWERTY? By the time better alternatives existed, QWERTY was everywhere. Switching would mean: → Retraining millions of typists → Replacing every keyboard and typewriter → Updating every typing course and textbook → Convincing everyone to adopt the same new standard simultaneously The cost of switching became higher than the cost of staying inefficient. This is the “QWERTY Effect” in action: When inferior solutions become so entrenched that superior alternatives can’t compete. Not because they’re worse, but because the switching costs are too high. Sounds familiar? We see this everywhere: • Legacy software systems that everyone hates but nobody replaces • File formats that are technically inferior but universally adopted • Processes that made sense 20 years ago but persist because “that’s how we’ve always done it” • Programming languages that aren’t the best tool for the job but have the largest community The next time someone asks why you’re not using the “obviously better” solution, remember QWERTY. Sometimes we stick with inferior systems not because we’re stupid, but because we’re trapped by our own success. ----- Liked this? You might enjoy 𝙄𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙪𝙢 too, it’s where I write more like this. Link’s under my profile Elena Petkovska.

Elena PetkovskaMar 23, 2026

We mapped 30 newsletters worth studying at Evernomic. They all run on either Substack, beehiiv, or Ghost. We've written a full comparison of all three platforms, because each one has a different strength, a different trade-off, and a different playbook (link in the comments). 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸: Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer → Substack's network did the distribution for him. Lenny Rachitsky → 78% growth from algorithm alone. Alex Xu, ByteByteGo → Book turned largest engineering newsletter. Packy McCormick, Not Boring → Sponsors fund free distribution. Chamath Palihapitiya → Podcast audience funneled straight to Substack. Mario Gabriele, The Generalist → Sponsorship revenue surpassed paid. Sahil Bloom, The Curiosity Chronicle → Built the most documented Twitter-to-newsletter pipeline in the industry. Rubén Domínguez Ibar, The VC Corner → High-signal VC updates. Rex Woodbury, Digital Native → Cultural lens on consumer tech. Justin Welsh, Unsubscribe → No growth tactics, no monetization pressure. 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗶𝘃: Rowan Cheung, The Rundown AI → 0 to 2M in under two years. Zain Kahn, Superhuman AI → Scaled entirely via X and paid social. Pete Huang and Noah Edelman, The Neuron → Clean no-hype AI coverage. Team at Dupple, TechEspresso → Concise daily tech digest. Shaan Puri and Ben Levy, Milk Road → Built in a year, sold for 7 figures. Alex Garcia, Marketing Examined → Every issue a standalone playbook. Greg Isenberg, Startup Ideas Newsletter → A weekly idea habit that turned into a full media company. Dave Lavinsky, Growing Your Empire → Practical startup advice. Jack Appleby, Future Social → Essential weekly social deep-dive. Michael Houck, Houck's Newsletter → Free founder mentorship for 45K people. beehiiv's ad network means generosity has a revenue floor. 𝗚𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁: Isaac Saul, Tangle → No platform owns his audience. David Sirota, The Lever → Fully independent newsroom from zero. Casey Newton, Platformer → Left Substack for Ghost. The most watched platform migration. The Flash Report → No personal brand. Proof you do not need a face. Robert Cottrell, The Browser → Charging for curation since before it was cool. Jay Clouse, Creator Science → Built $2M+ on content as discipline. Byrne Hobart, CFA, The Diff → 1.5% of the Forbes 400 reads this. Kai Brach, Dense Discovery → 36K+ subs. One person. No team. Simon Owens, The Business of Content → The definitive creator business guide. Jason Koebler, 404 Media → Ex-VICE editors, independent journalism. P.S. we gathered the data based off what was publicly available. If something seems off, I'd love to hear!

Elena PetkovskaOct 7, 2025

I've decided to embrace my conference alter ego. "Petrovska" was the WhatTheStack Conference 2025 edition of my surname. I've accepted my fate at this point: every conference badge will spell my name wrong. But honestly, when 750+ developers show up and nobody mentions the typo because they're too busy discussing what they just learned, you know the organizers DeveD, 42.mk - Base42, and Angular Macedonia, got everything else right. The speaker lineup delivered way beyond what I expected from a regional conference: Tejas Kumar's breakdown of Multi-Agent Systems gave me a practical framework I can actually use. Wekoslav Stefanovski's examples around security, architecture, and debugging were so relatable. Bozidar Spirovski introduced the concept of "vibe coding" and his practical techniques for securing AI-generated code are now part of my workflow. Peter van Vliet's "Schrödinger's App" concept and the idea that architecture doesn't have to be decided upfront, that you can keep options open until deployment, changes the entire conversation about monoliths vs microservices. Daniel Roe 🏡 shared insights on building beyond frameworks and the patterns he outlined for surviving technology shifts are immediately applicable. Pawel Kozlowski from Google's Angular team gave us a genuine look at how AI is reshaping framework development, and his perspective on it in the AI era was eye-opening. Nina's Nano Stores demo was a masterclass in doing more with less, which made me rethink every dependency decision. Domagoj Marić's session on web data extraction covered the legal and ethical considerations nobody talks about enough. Miodrag's framework for "vibe coding" skills and multi-agent systems gave structure to something that feels chaotic right now. Fanis Prodromou's Planning Poker demo with Angular and Supabase showed real implementation, work through actual code decisions in real-time taught me more than abstract architecture talks. Tony's willingness to experiment with weird ideas reminded me why I got into web development in the first place. Daniel Afonso's State of JavaScript Testing 2025 was the reality check the testing conversation needs. His breakdown of what's actually changed versus what's still broken helped me understand where to invest learning time. The format worked. Single day, with a week of practical workshops before it, multiple tracks, great coffee for me, and enough beer for others to turn strangers into collaborators. Darko Bozhinovski and Ilija Boshkov as MCs kept the energy right without the forced enthusiasm most conferences push. This is what developer conferences should feel like. I'm already looking forward to next year. ----- Liked this? You might enjoy 𝙄𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙪𝙢 too, it’s where I write more like this. Link’s under my profile Elena Petkovska.