Meditations

Just some reminders to myself. Inspiration for this page is from Sean Cassidy.

You haven’t made it until you’ve been called a sellout
Don’t blame others
Make it hard to use wrong
Fail Fast
Fail Often, but don’t make it a habit.
Don’t commit your config files
“I would have made it shorter but I didn’t have the time”
Smile
Every hour of travelling, meetings and process should have a positive return
Take unsolicited advice from experience with a grain of salt
Don’t feign surprise
Don’t be unnecessarily angry
Be nice to support staff
Watch where your company is headed
Solve problems don’t just add features
Assume people’s work is well-intentioned
Do no harm
You can learn from anyone or anywhere
Don’t look to criticize and refute, but to understand and learn
Everyone thinks other people are strong, confident and sure of themselves, most often they are not.
You have one life to do all the things you’ll ever do.
“I want to be around people who do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what to do. I want to be around people who dream and support, and do things.” – Amy Poehler
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six of them sharpening my axe”
When things get tough, try harder.
“I must use these great men’s virtues as a cloak for my weakness.” – Michel De Montaigne
“Creative insights often occur by making unusual connections: seeing analogies between ideas that have not previously been related. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.” – Sir Ken Robinson
We stagger through our romantic, professional and social worlds with the goal of merely not crashing. Never considering that we might soar.
Hardware eventually fails, software eventually works
When pitching always sell the prize. Make people realize how bad the current situation is without it, make them want the prize.
To achieve something you need a plan and not enough time
When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their first motherboard, they didn’t envision the iPhone. Visions can start small. Visions should start small
Silence, please.
Everything on this list
Work until your idols become your rivals
“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein
“Don’t make a habit out of choosing what feels good over what’s actually good for you”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.” – Albert Camus
Tech doesn’t have to be hard. People make it hard because they have priorities other than the simplest interface or the best experience.
It is better to do than to seem.
When copies are abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
Software, free. The manual, $10,000.
One should attempt to have more eulogy virtues instead of career virtues.
Time debt is anything that you do which will commit you to doing unavoidable work in the future.
“Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.” From Mass Effect but applicable to using APIs and relying on others’ technology.
“Don’t be a boilerplate programmer. Instead, build tools for users and other programmers. Take historical note of textile and steel industries: do you want to build machines and tools, or do you want to operate those machines?”
“There’s like six of us, and we’re all freaking really good,” Javon Leake said. “Coming to practice everyday, you just got to remember that everybody in the room’s good, so you’ve just got to show up with your A game.”
“I have a theory that commercially successful software development methodologies are like diets: they have to be almost impossible to follow. This ensures that when you fail to lose weight/achieve bug free software, you blame yourself for not following the rules exactly, rather than the rules for not working.” – me_again
“Leadership is influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.”
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, “We did this ourselves.”
He was like a great swimmer that tried to tackle a grand rapid, and the model he used successfully in the past, the map that had navigated a lot of difficult terrain, was not the map he needed anymore. He had an excellent theory about retailing that applied in some circumstances, but not in others. The terrain had changed, but the old idea stuck. https://fs.blog/2015/11/map-and-territory/
Hire people in the way that you want to be hired. The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup.
A good analogy for product management is filling a jar with rock, pebbles, and sand. The rocks are new products, pebbles are features, and the sand are small fixes. If you want to fit the most stuff in the jar, you put the rocks in first, then the pebbles, then the sand. If you put the sand in first, somehow there’s not enough room for the rocks. Product management is like that. It’s about resource planning — maximizing the amount of stuff that you can push through the system with a fixed amount of resources. You will actually fit more through your roadmap by planning the rocks on a quarterly cadence. The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup.
A motivated engineer easily makes multiple times the impact of a “factory worker” who only does what they’re told. For organizations with a factory worker attitude, this approach will bias towards more heavyweight project management approaches that leave little room for interpretation, on purpose. How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum.
In a very real way, it’s all conditional jumps in assembly, and every thing you’ve learned to make programming easier by allowing more directly letting you express your high level intent is just sugar. It might even help some or most of the time. But what you’re actually doing is creating a bunch of branches and loops, and as much as the high level stuff might help, you really shouldn’t forget this is the medium you actually work in.
Most professions have a healthy respect for the base materials they work with no matter how high the abstractions and structures they build with it go. Artists know their paints, stone, metal, etc. Engineers know their materials as well. They build by taking the advantages of each material into consideration, not assuming that it’s no longer relevant to their job because they get to just work in I-beams. Programmers would do well to adopt a healthy respect for their base materials, and it seems like often we don’t. Kbenson @ HackerNews
“No escape from patterns and systems, no exits. Nothing, and no one, resides outside a system; that’s the way it is.”
“You have to play like you never want the game to end,” he said. And he was right. I didn’t believe him. But I asked him to tell me more. “In life, and in chess, people make terrible decisions just because they’re impatient. They want things to end, right now, on their terms. They just want a reckoning, whether or not it’s actually good. So they play f4, or they play bishop takes h7, and they just tear everything apart. But you don’t have to play that way. You can play for hundreds of moves, if you want to. You could play for a thousand. And if you’re happy with that, your opponent will be like, I want a sandwich, I want a beer, I want to get out of here. But meanwhile, you’re content. You don’t have to go anywhere. You just like moving the pieces around. You just like playing chess.”
A lot of people think they have to make it uncomfortable and make it as hard as they can but if you find comfort then you can work from there. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STj894Ex2Z8
True confidence lies in acknowledging the good and bad, weaknesses and strengths. It doesn’t come from an over-inflated ego. That may work well when the task isn’t difficult. But like a runner who believes that a marathon will be a piece of cake, reality will smack them in the face sooner or later, and they’ll spiral towards catastrophizing and wanting to quit much more than the person who acknowledges the reality of the task at hand and what it takes to work through it. The key to leadership isn’t false bravado and projection, it’s living and dealing in reality. Want To Be A Better Leader? Embrace Reality.
Commit to following through on what you’ve already planned or launched before you chase the next creative, experimental, or shiny idea. “Earn the right to build” and “have respect for sequencing” are principles I’ve internalized. What I Learned at Clubhouse 📓
Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. —Bruce Schneier (“Memo to the Amateur Cipher Designer,” 1998)