Avishai Ish-Shalom:

To sum up: Variance is the enemy of performance and the source of much of the latency we encounter when using software.

To keep latency to a minimum:

• As a rule of thumb, target utilization below 75%,
• Steer slower workloads to paths with lower utilization,
• Limit variance as much as possible when utilization is high,
• Implement backpressure in systems where it is not built-in,
• Use throttling and load shedding to reduce pressure on downstream queues.

Pat has collected a list of resources for learning about product management.

Coda Hale:

Most explanations of organizational success or failure are crap.

…

an organization doing work is just an incredibly complex, dynamic, distributed, parallel process.

…

As with writing highly-concurrent applications, building high-performing organizations requires a careful and continuous search for shared resources, and developing explicit strategies for mitigating their impact on performance.

…

The only scalable strategy for containing coherence costs is to limit the number of people an individual needs to talk to in order to do their job to a constant factor.

There are so many quotable sections in this piece.

Go and have a read if you think about organisations, how they work, and how to improve them.

Marina Hyde:

Anyway, Zuckerberg is in the news along with News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, in a heartwarming generational fight between billionaires for who gets to say: “Bitch, I’m not IN the news, I OWN the news.”

Ben Brooks:

I don’t need areas or projects to do my work effectively. I don’t need complex chaining rules and sequences. I don’t need start dates or tags. In late November I realized that while Things still worked fine for me, I was using it not for task management any longer — but instead I was using it as a reminder engine.

I think all I need is a Reminder engine, I am pretty good at getting my tasks done once I am reminded of them.

I’ve been thinking about how working as a manager differs from working as an individual contributor. One thing I’ve noticed is that my day to day work as a manager has become more asynchronous.

Projects tend to be composed of a series of pings and responses with the odd timeout when I haven’t heard back from someone.

This post from Ben resonates with me because I feel that my productivity system is more useful when it reminds me to do things rather than helps me break down the steps of a particular task.

James Clear:

Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.

Denise Yu:

In every conversation you’re part of, create clarity and reduce chaos.

With more advice on how to do that in the linked thread.

A series of posts from Hillel Wayne resulting from interviews with people who have worked as both traditional engineers and software engineers.

• Are we really engineers?
• We are not special.
• What engineering can teach (and learn from) us.

I appreciate that this is based upon the views of folks who’ve actually worked on both sides of the fence.

Chris Kiehl:

The word “scalable” has a mystical and stupefying power over the mind of the software engineer. Its mere utterance can whip them into a depraved frenzy. Grim actions have been justified using this word.

An inspection of how values affect software through the lens of text editors.

Sahil Lavingia:

Because I was burned out and didn’t want to think about working any more than I needed to, I instituted a no-meeting, no-deadline culture.

For me, it was no longer about growth at all costs, but “freedom at all costs.”

…

At some point, it clicked: Creators make money so they can make stuff, instead of the other way around. Why not adopt this framing at Gumroad, too?

This is what working in the creator economy should feel like.

A look at the unorthodox way Gumroad operates.

No. 26 (Montemerlo’s Law) Don’t do nuthin’ dumb.

Kelly Sutton:

A Campaign is a long-running effort to enact global change safely within a sociotechnical system.

…

Campaigns work well to address:

• Technical changes with large social components.
• Technical changes that require everyone to do a little bit of work.
• High-value or inevitable future worlds

Esther Derby:

Clarity enables patterns of coherent action across the organization. Contextual understanding supports initiative–people don’t have to wait to be told what to do. It speeds Decision Making as people closer to the work have the information to make more decisions in a reasonable way. Clarity reduces the need for supervision.

…

Smoothing the flow of work, organizing work and teams to reduce dependencies and handoffs, is management work.

Gregor Hohpe:

Sadly, or perhaps luckily, most experimentation isn’t all that dramatic. It mainly means trying something new and using the results to decide a further course of action. You can experiment with a more efficient route to the office, with a new dinner recipe, or a new vacation destination. The element that distinguishes an experiment from serendipity is that you have a hypothesis that you are looking to verify or falsify based on data that you glean from running the experiment.