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2024

  • 1 min read

Department of Justice versus The Future

Link: Department of Justice versus The Future: "If our government is concerned about protecting and enhancing competitive behavior, why has it chosen to sue Apple for choosing to do everything for its customers?"

Attached is an insightful article showing the craziness of the government using apple messenger as the basis for going after apple for anticompetitive behavior. Put in historical context, it makes no sense!

  • 1 min read

How to Do Great Work

Link: How to Do Great Work: ""

The attached essay by Paul Graham gives his views on how someone can think about finding the right project to work on. Not a job but work that is their own. I love this quote: “What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for”. I’m personally familiar with “a degree that would bore most other people”.

  • 1 min read

Goal Crafting

Link: Goal Crafting: "Goal crafting is one of the most essential leadership activities. Organizational performance and team growth depend on well-crafted goals. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, your teams may focus on what is in front of their noses, solving what seems quickly solvable. Good goal crafting forces you not to ignore or postpone problems that require new ways of thinking, collaboration, or hardships. Without a good goal-crafting exercise, you can get stuck in the status quo or focus on what matters to you or your opinions, not what your stakeholders might need."

The attached article has some good advice regarding goal setting, strategy and prioritization.

  • 1 min read

Jade Rubick - Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective

Link: Jade Rubick - Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective: "A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned."

The attached article describes an org structure apparently originated at Amazon, called “single threaded owner” or STO. In a company with multiple products, one common setup is to have separate dev, pm and design groups each covering all products. STO says to have a separate, single manager for each product, the STO. Interesting idea.

  • 1 min read

The design decisions and evolution of a method definition - Ruby case study

Link: The design decisions and evolution of a method definition - Ruby case study: "Episode 01 of studying Ruby programming language design decisions, how they evolved with time, and how they look in a wider context."

Attached is a great article that dissects subtle Ruby design decisions, the trade offs made, the decisions, comparison with other languages. Here the focus is just on method arguments.

  • 1 min read

How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet

Link: How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet: "I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market."

Here is a very interesting retrospective on Alexa's AI features and how essentially they blew their lead. Same can be said of Siri. The differnce is that it looks like Apple is doubling down and Amazon? When I say they blew the lead: Alexa was the unchallenged dominant product in the space of home voice activated assistants. There was no other. Read the story...