• Project Management Is Overlooked and Important

    Being able to lead a project that coordinate multiple people, teams, and organizations is critical for career development. At a certain point, the limiting factor in one’s career is not skill, but the ability to do project management sufficiently well.

    Project management gets a bad rap in software development. It’s associated with pushy, uninformed people that press deadlines.

    However, the ability to manage a project well is a size-of-the-pie increasing activity regardless of role.

    Not only can one contribute work individually but coordinate the work of many other people towards a common goal. Few things that are valuable can be done individually, no matter how skilled someone is.

    See also:

  • Elaboration Leads to Understanding

    An overlooked part of understanding information and not merely memorizing it, is to elaborate on the meaning of something you just learned. When taking notes, it’s easy to end up with a detailed list of things without actually understanding the content. Without connecting the ideas with what you already know, you can’t attach the ideas to any scaffolding that would be needed for generating new ideas later (or even recall them).

    In How to Take Smart Notes, the author talks about the crucial step of pausing to ask questions of a fact or idea in order to elaborate on it. “What does it mean? What is this similar to? What is the difference between this thing and that thing?”

    It’s the connections between ideas that creates meaning, understanding, and new knowledge.

    See also:

  • Atoms and Bits

    The prevailing industry of the last century was the industry of atoms—physical infrastructure, extraction of natural resources, and moving things around faster.

    The prevailing industry of the next century is the industry of bits—internet infrastructure, extraction of data, and moving around information at the speed of light.

    The industry of atoms ended up being governed by the infrastructure of bits. Digitization touched every part of the economy and society to the point where the industry of bits is effectively the industry of atoms.

    (I don’t recall where I first heard this idea, maybe it was from patio11).

    See also:

    • The industry of bits was made possible by a jump to universality in computing, might there be others?
    • Capitalism is dead shows us how the industry of bits changed capitalism into feudalism

  • Capitalism Is Dead (Literature Notes)

    The essay Capitalism is dead: long live Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, describes how advancements in technology killed what we used to call capitalism and replaced it, unwittingly, with a form of feudalism.

    …our preferences are now shaped not by markets but by machine networks — what I call “cloud capital”. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is the portal to a totalitarian, fully centralised system of preference creation and satisfaction. First, it trains us to train it to dictate what we want. Second, it sells us what we now “want” directly, bypassing any actual marketplace. Third, it succeeds in making us sustain this enormous behavioural modification machine with our free labour: we post reviews, rate products. Finally, it amasses huge rents from capitalists who rely on this network of cloud capital, usually 40% of sale price. That’s not capitalism. Welcome to Technofeudalism.

    • Cloud capital killed capitalism (markets and profits)
      • Markets were replaced by online marketplaces that aren’t really markets, they are fiefdoms (Apple takes 40%, Amazon charges sellers 30%)
      • Profits were replaced with cloud rent (servers, SaaS subscriptions, APIs, listing in the marketplace)
    • Capital is no longer physical goods, machinery, but digital (cloud capital) and we toil like serfs for a small number of cloud lords that own the fiefdoms
    • The latest in cloud capital is to train us to train it to control us (AI, machine learning). We serve it for free by giving it data, content, attention.

    See also:

  • Org-Roam Mobile

    My hunt for a mobile setup for org-roam continues. LogSeq doesn’t handle org IDs. Plain Org is buggy (syncing with Dropbox, recent file list disappears, copy and paste doesn’t work, etc.). Beorg is too slow after upgrading to iOS 17.

    Now I’m trying a git based workflow using Working Copy and Shortcuts. It eliminates sync conflicts with iCloud or Dropbox (or at least, I’m much more capable of resolving these conflicts using git). While not as fully featured as Beorg, it can do the main thing I need to do on mobile—capturing new tasks.

    Since all of my notes are in a git repository already, all I need is automation to smooth out the experience. I created a Shortcut using Working Copy’s support for x-callback-url to pull the repo, write text to the end of a file, and prompt me to commit and push (this also works in the share sheet and with Siri). On desktop, using git-auto-commit-mode, every time I save a sync’d file it will push it to the repo.

    If I forget to save/sync before switching over to mobile, I can use git to resolve it to avoid data loss. For simple conflicts, it might be able to resolve automatically.

    See also:

  • Zeigarnik Effect

    Open tasks occupy short-term memory until they are done. It’s distracting to have so many open tasks because it’s natural to keep thinking about them.

    However, additional research by Zeigarnik found that we don’t actually need to finish tasks in order to stop thinking about them. As long as tasks are written down and we trust that they will be done later, it’s enough to convince our brains to stop carrying them around in our short-term memory.

    From How to Take Smart Notes.

    See also:

  • How to Think About Go-to-Market

    GTM decomposes into the entire business—it all must work in concert to be effective.

    • Value proposition is clear and people want this (messaging, pricing, marketing)
    • Product delivers on promises (solves target users, low churn)
    • Find renewable sources of customers

    The overall objective is to increase growth rate. In order to do that, there needs to be a quick feedback loop to figure out what works. When you find something that works, double down. That means there are two modes—experimentation and doubling down.

    (This note is a work in progress)

  • Queuing Cost

    Anytime you put a task in a queue (a todo list, a backlog, a ticket, etc.) the item immediately incurs a cost. The cost increases the effort needed to resolve the item and reduces the likelihood it will ever get done.

    If a task is really important, mind the queuing cost.

    What leads to queuing cost?

    The cost comes from the wall-clock time it takes your system to resurface the task, the effort of recording the context to complete the task later, and the natural tendency to cherry-pick.

  • Capture and Refile

    The two most important parts of a personal productivity system that I’ve learned are capturing and refiling.

    The idea of a “capture” comes from Getting Things Done (GTD) where you have a low friction way of capturing any task and putting it somewhere. This allows you to reliably queue up work so you don’t need to use your limited mental bandwidth to keep track of it. It also give you a moment to decide if you should do it right now (if it takes a few minutes it’s better to do it right away because of queuing cost).

    Refiling is going through the list of captured tasks and deciding what to do with each item. This is a chance to decide when you want to do it, how important it is, and where it should go. Separating refiling from capturing further lowers the friction to getting tasks into the system and builds confidence that you will actually look at it later.

    See also:

    • I use emacs and org-mode to capture work and stick in a file to review later

  • In Venture, You Can Only Lose 1x Your Money

    Venture capitalist Bill Gurley, when talking about losses reminds people that a fund can lose it’s money 1x on a failed investment in a business that goes under but can miss out 10,000x if they fail to invest in a big winner.

    If you think about the nature of venture capital, it’s highly rational to have a risk profile that accepts a lot of failure to avoid misses because they are in the business of delivering returns.

    It’s also rational to get into a deal at nearly any valuation. Sequoia famously walked away from Google because Larry Page was looking for a $120MM pre. The deal got done at $80MM. (GOOGL marketcap is 1.6 trillion at time of writing).

    See also:

  • You Are What Your Record Says You Are

    Bill Parcells, when prompted to defend himself after his first season as the Giants head coach going 3-12 said, “You are what your record says you are.”

    Of course, Parcells was talking about football but this maxim applies to many walks of life. At the end of the day, results matter and you can only hide from the truth for so long.

  • To Be Offended, You Must Value Their Opinion

    Being offended and caring what others think about you go hand in hand. If you are offended by someone, a part of you values their opinion. Similarly, if you don’t care what others think, you won’t be easily offended.

    In practice, this is difficult advice to follow. People tend to care what others think of them and therefore value their opinion. To counter this tendency, ask yourself, “Would you seek their advice in the future?”. If the answer is ‘yes’, then you should talk to them because you actually value their opinion. If the answer is ‘no’, their opinion doesn’t matter and recognizing that can help you move along.

    See also:

  • Ack and Come Back

    If you don’t answer a message in a timely manner, the other person has to assume either you haven’t received it or you chose not to respond. If they believe you haven’t received it, their only recourse is to message you again. If they believe you chose not to respond, they might have some feels about it.

    It’s always better to respond quickly even if you can’t fully answer the contents of the message. If you can’t answer quickly, acknowledge the receipt and come back to it later. Acknowledging helps the other person know that the ball is in your court and you will get less follow-on pings.

    Assuming you actually do come back with a response later, it will help build trust since you followed through on what you said you would do.

    See also:

  • Avoiding Losers as an Investment Strategy

    One way to have good returns when investing is to have a few winners and merely avoid losers. Of course, you must have some winners and a plausible way to avoid the losers which is easier said than done. In the world of investing, the winners take care of themselves because they will have an outsized gain compared to everything else.

    Another way to invest is to have more winners at the risk of more losers (e.g. the venture capital model). You need to be able to identify the winners before others do. You need to have more winners to offset the risk of more losers.

    This a neat way Howard Marks explains risk and why the extremes don’t work. You can’t have only winners. You can’t avoid all losers.

    See also: