Leaving notes in a way that takes advantage of our innate relationship with space and context. For example: leaving a post-it note on the door for the next time you head out to remind yourself to buy something you need. This spatial context relationship can be applied to our digital lives as well. Notes that live alongside emails are a much better cue than remembering to check your note-taking app for todos related to the person you are talking to or the email thread. See also:
80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This distribution seems to repeat in many problem spaces where there is an imbalance between the inputs and outputs.
When building products you are always learning new things about the user, the market, and their problems. Sometimes this happens intentionally (e.g. doing user research) and sometimes it happens unintentionally (e.g. adding a feature that suddenly takes off in usage). Ideally these facts are made explicit and is accretive over time so that new facts leads to better understanding over time which leads to more successful products. This also requires flexibility and updating ones model as new information is uncovered. This is similar to the ideas from lean startup where the goal is to efficiently validate critical assumptions by building the minimum required to learn from users. Facts don’t necessarily need to be provable to be valuable, just correct (a G-statement). Gödel Incompleteness For Startups argues that the unprovable yet true facts are the most scarce and therefore most valuable.
A single number to measure the productivity of a knowledge worker could be the number of new notes added per day. This idea comes from Andy Matuschak based on a foundation that knowledge work should be accretive and each note being an atomic idea that contributes to the overall pool of knowledge one can access.
A kind of fuel for nuclear reactors composed of a ‘sand’ of coated fuel pellets. This allows the fuel to expand and contract, but the fission products (e.g. gasses) stay contained. The fuel has a negative temperature reactivity coefficient which halts the fission reaction if the fuel reaches a certain temperature. This self regulation makes it much safer compared to conventional reactors. See also:
Smaller self-contained nuclear reactors that can be manufactured and shipped. Multiple micro-reactors can be combined for higher energy needs. It is believed to be safer because it can be manufactured and shipped (along with self-regulating Tri-structural isotropic particle fuel (TRISO) fuel) rather than custom built on-site as nuclear reactors are today. They use helium gas to cool the reactor which is also safer in case of excess heat and more efficient for generating electricity. See also:
Nuclear reactors are often regulated by water to control excess heat. However, micro-reactors are cooled using Helium gas. This has the advantage of eliminating the possibility of phase changes like water turning into gas which generates pressure. It is also more efficient for generating electricity since water does not need to be moved around the reactor.
Focusing on continuously improving p99.9 latency (long tail latency) not only improves overall latency, it necessitates more reliable systems, better user experience, and enables more enterprise sales who tend to want contractual obligations around p50 latency. Read Everything you know about latency is wrong. See also:
Telcos and cloud providers that require a high degree of uptime and reliability aim to have less than 1% of incidents caused by code or configuration changes. In reality this is closer to 10%, but the goal makes clear the kinds of systems and infrastructure required.
A study performed in 2008 by UC San Diego found that American households consumed ~3.6 Zettabytes of information in a year. Between 1980 and 2008, the annual growth rate of information consumption is 5.4 percent.
In the early stage of a startup, companies have limited resources and a wide range of things that need to get done. Founders often wear ‘multiple hats’ to build and run the company. This follows to early employees—even with a stated job role, out of necessity they will need to go beyond it. This appeals to generalists (those who can do multiple kinds of things reasonably well) and is highly valued because the startup needs to do a wide range of things with limited resources. Contrast that to a startup that is further along (> 1000 employees) and the needs change. Organization and administrative functions are required to coordinate many people working towards a shared set of goals. This puts pressure to hire the right person for a specific role where roles are defined to help administrators make sense of their workforce. Needs become more specific, and specialists are valued more because 1) they fit the definition of what’s needed more clearly 2) deeper expertise is required to solve more specific problems immediately.
When interviewing candidates about their experiences and challenges they have encountered, you learn a lot about their employer, how they work, and the real story behind some decisions if you listen closely. See also:
The practice of being mindful about consciousness so that one can be more present and not have their mental states dictated by things out of their control. It takes deliberate effort to build the skill of recognizing the thoughts that appear and controlling our attention at will.
In the new normal brought on by COVID-19, typical activities that we rely on to recover and recharge are not available anymore due to the economic shutdown. For example, socializing with friends at a restaurant or going to the gym. In addition, some of those previous activities that might have been restorative actually detract from overall well-being. For example, going for a leisurely walk outside raises your anxiety every time you pass someone on the street and are reminded of the virus or protecting your vulnerable household.
A way of modeling an external API provider as a compute resource for executing an agent program. Instead of making a request and getting a response (as in the usual HTTP API pattern) you submit a program that executes in the provider’s environment. This could allow users of an API to simplify their access patterns, benefit from data locality, and have stronger guarantees for execution than hosting their own infrastructure. For example, instead of making a read request to get some data then make a write based on that data and wait for an async webhook, the requestor could submit a program that does all of that executes within the providers contained environment. See also:
In game design and development, juice is a term for the details that make the game visually interesting and exciting to interact with. Examples include screen shakes, subtle animations, music and sound effects, personality, etc. In the talk ‘Juice it or lose it’, Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho walk through making a rudimentary brick breaker game and adding juice to make it much more appealing.
In video game programming it can be tempting to replicate a client server model similar to how websites work. This is generally a mistake because game state tends to be highly co-mingled between state and graphics. Attempting to cleanly separate the ‘backend’ game logic with ‘frontend’ visuals results in awkward boundaries between the two, which are still coupled, but in a way that requires more complicated code to manage (e.g. a message bus, event sourcing) and are probably less performant (e.g. passing json messages within a 33ms frame budget).
Stands for ‘below the line up front’ as a way leading with the conclusion from a memo. This helps save the reader time when sending a communication to a wider distribution and raises ambient knowledge of the organization. See also:
User experience research (UXR) is a function that works with users and analyzing data to learn about and test ideas. This serves as a way to avoid common biases when building products and making decisions (e.g. confirmation bias, availability bias, etc) by talking to real people outside of an organization. See also:
A book by Yuval Noah Harari about the history of humans and how we got to where we are today.
When given the option to start with something pre-built, developer minded users are skeptical they won’t have enough control over the implementation and run into a critical limitation or burden. This leads to the impulse to build using the lowest level control they can (e.g. API integration). However, it’s often the case that they under estimate the cost of building and maintaining their customized solution. Examples:
Users that think about your product in terms of how it will be used and what they need it to do. They imagine implementing the product and the downstream effects (like ongoing maintenance). Experience colors the developer-minded user—bad experiences in the past brings in additional decision criteria and expectations. See also:
Users that frame decisions by understanding cost, benefits, and want to buy solutions. They often use ROI as a mental model for whether or not to use a product or choose between providers. When choosing a technical solution they value speed of delivery and ongoing costs. They are more likely to choose ‘plug and play’ options they don’t have to imagine. See also:
A photography exhibit by Eric Pickersgill which shows people in their every day life looking at their phones, but with the phone removed from the image. The effect is an eerie feeling in seeing subjects stare blankly into their hands in what should amount to social situations.