Notes From the Field

  • One Pull Request per Day

    Productive engineers should write one pull request per day. One pull request per day creates forward momentum.

  • Goodhart's Law

    Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern summarized Goodhart’s law most succinctly saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

  • IQ Loss From COVID-19 Infection

    A study of over 100,000 people in England found that found that cognitive deficits from COVID-19 infection (memory, reasoning and executive function) were similar between those whose symptoms resolved in less than 4 weeks and 12 weeks but were larger in those who had unresolved persistent symptoms (long COVID).

  • AI Bubble

    In Money AI Bubble, the author argues that the market is in an AI bubble.

  • The Shirky Principle

    Institutions end up perpetuating the problems they aim to resolve, either intentionally or unintentionally.

  • Time to First Million ARR

    One way to measure product market fit is to look at the time it takes between putting a product out in the market to the first $1MM in ARR.

  • Time to Sign Benchmarks

    According to a report by Common Paper of 1,000 businesses, commercial agreements take a median of 3 to 4 days to sign depending on the size of the company.

  • B2B Benchmarks

    A collection of benchmarks for B2B businesses (mostly relevant for early-stage SaaS).

  • The Needs Stack

    The needs stack is a way of describing what a customer is trying to do when they are buying.

  • Emacs Completion Stack

    There are many packages for completions in Emacs. I recently switched over from ido and helm to the MOVEC stack: Marginalia, Orderless, Vertico, Embark, Consult.