A nicely laid out story of how we got where we are in software product design.

Mitchell Hashimoto:

This is my journey of how I found value in AI tooling and what I’m trying next with it. In an ocean of overly dramatic, hyped takes, I hope this represents a more nuanced, measured approach to my views on AI and how they’ve changed over time.

Derek Thompson:

Stalin and Hitler: Both terrible, but also mutually destructive. Cancer and Alzheimer’s: Also both terrible and also, weirdly, mutually destructive. Apparently—and I never knew this—Alzheimer’s patients rarely have cancer. Doctors have studied the association for years without understanding the root cause. Maybe it’s mere selection effect, where people who don’t get cancer survive long enough to get dementia. Or maybe something more interesting is happening.

decryption:

Over a decade ago I got into FIRE - Financial Independence, Retire Early. I’m currently in the position where I’m closer to the end of a FIRE journey than the start, so here’s a big dump of knowledge on various finance topics relevant to me. This post exists primarily so I can get it out of my head and stop thinking about it.

A well written summary with loads of references.

Cate Hall:

It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.

Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.

Simon Willison:

It’s become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language.

This has worrying implications for open source projects with commercial business models. Here’s an example of a response: tldraw, the outstanding collaborative drawing library, are moving their test suite to a private repository.

It’s great to see Noah’s work collected again.

Casey Handmer, Matt Weickert:

This post explains our current views on how humanity will achieve Kardashev Level 1 status by exploiting the full energy resources of an entire planet. More specifically, how pure solar+batteries will power AI scaleup beyond gas turbine manufacturing limits.

Luke Plant:

The “pile of technical debt” is essentially a pile of knowledge – everything we now think is bad about the code represents what we’ve learned about how to do software better. The gap between what it is and what it should be is the gap between what we used to know and what we now know.

Mathias Verraes:

In DDD, we reason like this: The engineers need to build, maintain, and evolve secure and performant systems that serve the company. To do that, the engineers need an understanding of the domains and of the software systems. To achieve that, we leave the domains as the organisation sees them, and we draw our own Bounded Contexts to serve our need for understanding. The Bounded Contexts exist primarily for the engineers, and for the engineers’ communication with domain experts and other business functions.

Will Larson:

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.

Pasha Malla:

I hope that between us we can keep the lines of communication open and continue to share strategies that seem to work. My feeling is that there’s no team that is completely unbeatable, even if their star transforms into a werewolf before every game.

A story of persistence.

Lea Verou:

Treat user effort as a currency. To create a product users love, design the tradeoff curve of use case complexity to user effort with the same care you design your pricing scheme.

…

Incremental user effort cost should be proportional to incremental value gained.

A list of patterns worth understanding from Jason Yip.