Links

Think of me as a web crawler with taste.

A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events

Jeremy Morrell:

Adopting Wide Event-style instrumentation has been one of the highest-leverage changes I’ve made in my engineering career. The feedback loop on all my changes tightened and debugging systems became so much easier. Systems that were scary to work on suddenly seemed a lot more manageable.

52 Things Kent Hendricks Learned in 2024

Kent Hendricks:

Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%.

This matches my experience.

The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover accidentally blown off test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found.

Seems appropriate.

Mark Forster's Final Version

Mark Forster:

The most distinctive feature of FV is the way that its algorithm is primarily based on psychological readiness—this then opens the way to keeping urgency and importance in the best achievable balance.

I’m a sucker for productivity systems. I like the simplicity of this one.

How to Decide After Doing Discovery

Ryan Singer:

The counterintuitive thing is, we often feel like our task is to get to a “yes.” But what we actually need is a way to say “no.” It’s the ability to eliminate many, many things that aligns us on the one thing. It’s the “no, no, no, … YES!” that gives us the power to move forward and to stick with a project.

To help us to eliminate (not forever, but for the purpose of making a decision now) I’ve found one technique very helpful. The trick is to flip things around. Instead of describing the good that will happen by doing an idea, we look at what goes wrong when we don’t do it. To make that flip, we can ask two simple questions:

  1. Knowing the customer can’t do what’s in the idea today, What are they doing instead?
  2. What’s bad about that?