Page 7 of 126 (2518 total posts)

June 2024

23-06-2024
Department of Justice versus The Future

Department of Justice versus The Future

Source: open.substack.com

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?

Notes:

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!

Tags: apple government lawsuit legal messenger
23-06-2024
How to Do Great Work

How to Do Great Work

Source: paulgraham.com

How to Do Great Work URL: https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html Type: link Domain: paulgraham.com Notes: 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 q...

Notes:

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”.

Tags: paulgraham ambition hobbies passion
22-06-2024

Goal Crafting

Source: subbu.org

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.

Notes:

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

Tags: management leadership goals priority
22-06-2024
Jade Rubick - Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective

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

Source: rubick.com

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.

Notes:

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.

Tags: product-manager organization engineering management leadership
21-06-2024
The design decisions and evolution of a method definition - Ruby case study

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

Source: zverok.space

Episode 01 of studying Ruby programming language design decisions, how they evolved with time, and how they look in a wider context.

Notes:

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.

Tags: programming-language language-design ruby python design
18-06-2024
How Alexa Dropped the Ball on Being the Top Conversational System on the Planet

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

Source: mihaileric.com

I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.

Notes:

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...

Tags: ai alexa strategy llm amazon apple-maps
16-06-2024
System tests have failed

System tests have failed

Source: world.hey.com

When we introduced a default setup for system tests in Rails 5.1 back in 2016, I had high hopes. In theory, system tests, which drive a headless browser through your actual interface, offer greater confidence that the entire machine is working as it ought. And because it runs in a black-box fashion, it should be more resilient to imple...

Notes:

DHH declares system tests to be a failed experiment in the attached document. This is surprising to me but then not surprising. Surprised because intuitively it seems that system tests should be better for the stated reasons. And politically because it seems that the Ruby world had accepted that unit tests are easy to write but too brittle. And system tests were more real-life and robust. But not surprised because I have always found system tests a pain to write. But I don’t have large scale experience with that so I tended to agree with the world that system tests (aka end-to-end tests) were better. So here comes #DHH to argue that system tests have failed!

Tags: dhh system-tests end-to-end-tests ruby software-engineering unit-test
15-06-2024
Smooth Concurrent Updates with Hotwire Stimulus - Blog - Visuality

Smooth Concurrent Updates with Hotwire Stimulus - Blog - Visuality

Source: visuality.pl

It's time to get familiar with another part of Hotwire: Stimulus! In this article, I'll demonstrate using Stimulus to handle more complex frontend logic.

Notes:

I admit I get confused by the various packages in this family of related low or no JavaScript goodies released by DHH. Hotwire, Stimulus, Hotwire Stimulus (something different, I guess). Some come with rails, some compete with each other. No matter, I love them all. I love the idea of not having to write and debug JavaScript. Here’s an article with code that shows a great use case.

Tags: stimulus hotwire dhh javascript ruby
14-06-2024
Don’t Refactor Like Uncle Bob. Please

Don’t Refactor Like Uncle Bob. Please

Source: theaxolot.wordpress.com
Notes:

A nice deconstruction of a refactoring gone bad. The article makes good points and I agree that Uncle Bob’s (tm) refactoring is not great. Oh but apparently a ghost writer wrote that chapter. Now in defense of the book, it was written many years ago and we’ve all gotten a lot smarter about what it means to write Clean Code (tm). Here’s the article:

Tags: uncle-bob clean-code refactoring programming
14-06-2024
Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity

Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret: Founder Liquidity

Source: stefantheard.com

Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you'll get the same answer: "I'M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT'S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE A BIG MOVE!!!" And

Notes:

Another reason why I believe being the founder of a well funded startup is not risky. If the startup is indeed well funded then you as a founder or employee can count on your salary for say between one and three years. No matter what revenue or earnings are, because they are not expected at the very start. Compare that with a job at an established company where layoffs can come out of nowhere and affect anyone. Not sure which is riskier … it depends … but in my opinion the startup is not clearly riskier. See the attached article for an explanation of one factor, but not the only factor.

Tags: founder startup funding layoff equity entrepreneurship
14-06-2024
TEO

TEO

Source: teodev.io

TEO is the schema-driven web server framework native to Rust, Node.js and Python. It reduces developing time and improves developers' life experience.

Notes:

Wow a brand new web framework! Where did this spring from, apparently fully formed, out of nowhere? Or am I not hanging out in the right neighborhood? Take a look at the attached site!

Tags: teo web-framework rust rails django
12-06-2024
How to Annotate a Graph with Matplotlib and Python - Mouse Vs Python

How to Annotate a Graph with Matplotlib and Python - Mouse Vs Python

Source: blog.pythonlibrary.org

The Matplotlib package is great for visualizing data. One of its many features is the ability to annotate points on your graph. You can use annotations to

Notes:

The attached article shows nice code examples on how to put arrows pointing at specific points in your graph

Tags: matplotlib python charts arrows code how-to
11-06-2024
How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly - Learn How To Learn

How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly - Learn How To Learn

Source: learnhowtolearn.org

Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]

Notes:

This reminds me of the oil barron”s secret to great wealth: “wake up early. Work late. Strike oil”.

Tags: experience aphorism speed agility
10-06-2024
Piku

Piku

Source: piku.github.io

piku, inspired by dokku, allows you do git push deployments to your own servers, no matter how small they are.

Notes:

There are now several new and different ways for us to try and get back the magic of #heroku #git-push deployments. The attached link shows a new entrant that’s worth a look

Tags: piku heroku deploy github push