One of the more rewarding things we do at PPC Samurai is offer a pro-bono service to manage the campaigns of some amazing charity organizations. Google offer a very generous scheme that allows these non-profit organizations to access $10,000 USD per month of advertising spend. This allows these organizations to target donations or raise awareness, expanding their reach to a much greater audience.

Apart from meeting certain eligibility criteria, the grants have a few conditions on how your campaigns need to be run, including which search keywords you can bid on, including:

• No keywords with a quality score of 1…

As imperfect people, we all suffer from cognitive biases. A particularly insidious one is the sunk cost fallacy — the tendency to double-down on our mistakes just because we spent a lot of time and effort making them. In product development, this shows itself in the difficulty of realizing when you’ve overinvested in a bad idea — or even just continued to invest in a good one past the point where the effort exceeds its diminishing returns. Knowing when you should be prepared to cut your losses is a mark of maturity in product development and one that even the…

Like many developers, I cut my teeth on C/C++ and Java. I’ve written a lot of working software, and the vast majority of it was imperative or object-oriented. Sure I liked lambdas, and I had seen the difference that making stuff immutable had done for my multi-threaded code. But for me, functional programming seemed to be something for self-absorbed purists more concerned with the beauty of their code, and not something that I needed to help me get my job done.

So when I started my first job in Scala, I brought healthy skepticism. The syntax seemed nice — it…