Author: randyfong
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Beyond the Band-Aid: Solving Systems at the Root
Why do some of our best efforts to fix big problems—like urban food deserts or climate change—barely move the needle? Usually, it’s because we are pulling on ‘low-leverage’ strings. To truly solve a systemic problem, we have to look past the surface-level constants and find the ‘leverage points’ that govern the system’s goals and paradigms. Read more
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The $500 Billion Signal
OpenAI Just Triggered the Greatest Wealth Creation Event in History In October 2025, a quiet financial transaction reshaped the history of Silicon Valley. OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion secondary sale at a staggering $500 billion valuation, officially crowning it the most valuable private company on Earth—surpassing SpaceX. https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/openai-closes-6-6b-share-sale-at-historic-500b-valuation But the headline number hides the true Read more
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N8N Workflows and AI Agents Intro
By leveraging n8n’s extensible automation platform, you can create AI agents that act as automated workers to do a myriad of tasks in a fraction of the time it would take to code it by hand. It is simple to use and has literally thousands of applications. I recently built a workflow in n8n that takes a raw Read more
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Practical Weaviate Cloud Queries for IOS/MacOS
Integrate AI-driven search into your existing Swift and SwiftUI apps. Leverage the power of a managed vector database like Weaviate Cloud (WCD) to handle all the complex AI infrastructure, letting us, the developers, focus on what we do best—building amazing user experiences. Get Hands-On: The Query Helper Application To truly understand how to harness this Read more
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Creating Requirements FROM code
Creating user requirements from code is an effective way to communicate what an application is doing to non-technical users. Traditionally, a product manager defines requirements and gives them to a programmer TO CODE an application. Now code can be used to generate WHAT REQUIREMENTS HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED AND TESTED in an application. Armed with this Read more
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Making Food from Air
One of the cool things about living in San Francisco is the unique experiences you run into. Recently, I experienced a Food and Climate Week tech-themed event. It’s nice being first! I was the first in the world (so I was told) to experience a croissant using butter made by capturing carbon from air, hydrogen Read more
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Add Color to your UI
AI can help us pick awesome colors from any image we give it! It looks at all the shades and suggests a palette that just feels right, which is super handy if color theory isn’t one of your developed skills. We can use colors from a target image to make your app look even better! Read more
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Why Software Projects Fail
A common issue in software development is creating features without fully understanding the problem. How many times have you heard: “I am confident that the feature requested is now 100% complete and works great!”— only to find out that it was coded with errors and/or doesn’t work as expected? Much of this misunderstanding on the Read more
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Add Vector Search to your App
Ever want to apply a vector search to your iOS or macOS app quickly and with minimal effort? In 2024, I wrote an article for the vector DB platform company Weaviate on how to do that (see “Search with Benefits” article below). I included a simple SwiftUI playground application to help you practice. You can Read more