“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot”

–Michael Altshuler

Ideas, by definition, are always fragile

The reason people get good ideas in the shower is because it’s the only time during the day when most people are away from screens long enough to think clearly. The lesson is not to take more showers, but rather to make more time to think.

The mistake people make is following advice. Instead, you should use it to understand someone else's world model so that you can improve yours.

Run. Your. Own. Race!

I was telling Standard MBA students in 2009: "The constraints are your friends. Under-do the competition." Fifteen years later, it's still true, and we're still doing just that.

Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed us to scale to this size while engineers mostly focus on work that delivers value to users.

I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

It seems cosmically unfair – we have fewer years to live, and each year flies by faster.

But, why is that happening?

Over the past few weeks, I have been scanning my notes and homework from school using the nice professional scanners at my workplace. These notes have been sitting in my closet for several years because I don't want to keep them, but didn't want to throw them out until scanning them, and I've never had access to a scanner that could do all these pages.

This has prompted me to reflect on some of the habits and choices that I follow in my handwritten notes. I realize there are entire online cultures of journaling and notetaking and notebook-buying, and I'm not here to compete with them. This is just what I do.

The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.

So I tried various forms of todo lists, task trackers, and productivity apps. They were all discouraging because the things to do kept getting longer, and there were too many interrelated things like past meeting notes, calendar appointments, idea lists, and lab notebooks, which were all on different systems.

I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 14 years now. It is so essential to my work now, and has surprisingly scaled with a growing set of responsibilities, that I wanted to share this system. It's been my secret weapon.

You are an individual contributor at heart. You like writing code and solving technical problems. You dislike meetings and ceremony. Here’s what you can do to maximize what you like and minimize what you don’t: radiate information.

Toppling world's favourite stimulant will take more than just my story, so here I also present to you the rigorous findings of members from a fine establishment: the r/decaf subreddit.

For my more cerebral readers, I'll chuck in a bit of science too. But really the point is that you should do the experiment for yourself.

Just fuck around and you'll find out if caffeine-free works for you.

When you go into a restaurant and you see a sign that says “No Dogs Allowed,” you might think that sign is purely proscriptive: Mr. Restaurant doesn’t like dogs around, so when he built the restaurant he put up that sign.

If that was all that was going on, there would also be a “No Snakes” sign; after all, nobody likes snakes. And a “No Elephants” sign, because they break the chairs when they sit down.

The real reason that sign is there is historical: it is a historical marker that indicates that people used to try to bring their dogs into the restaurant.

In February, an engineer I’d managed for over a year moved to a new team. In one of our last 1:1s, I mentioned that he’d recently done some good project management. He replied that he’d had an epiphany about self-direction; he’d decided that he needed to own everything about his work, not just his code, to make sure his projects succeeded. I was impressed with him and, instantly, disappointed in myself — I’d long considered ownership the most important thing for young engineers to learn, but I’d somehow left this engineer to discover that for himself.

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

In the software world, “waterfall” is commonly used to describe a style of software process, one that contrasts with the ideas of iterative, or agile styles. Like many well-known terms in software it's meaning is ill-defined and origins are obscure - but I find its essential theme is breaking down a large effort into phases based on activity.

I remember working as a developer at a company and complaining that I had no idea what the bosses did all day. It felt like while we engineers were working hard and shipping stuff, managers just talked to a lot of people all the time, or sat in their offices behind closed doors, and I had no idea what their work looked like.

Чи ви пам’ятаєте, як нещодавно комп’ютер пройшов тест Тьюрінга? Пропоную розібратись з тим, що таке суперінтелект, чого нам від нього очікувати і куди взагалі ведуть нас сучасні комп’ютерні технології. В цьому дописі переклад відразу 2-х частин статті. Щоб ви були готові — це лонгрід.

Ми на порозі четвертої технологічної революції, але яку можна порівняти лише з виникненням людського життя на Землі. — Vernor Vinge

І як це бути на порозі технологічної революції?

What's an Effective Engineer?

• They are the people who get things done. Effective Engineers produce results.

Привет! Меня зовут Сергей Алексеев, в IТ я уже 9-й год и в последнее время зачастил на DOU со своими статьями. Это обусловлено тем, что я хочу передать сообществу свои знания. В этот раз я решил написать статью, в которой будет много примеров артефактов, без которых либо невозможно сделать программное обеспечение, либо из-за их отсутствия увеличивается срок разработки ПО. Или еще хуже — будет реализовано совершенно не того, что было задумано изначально.

I completely cut it and it changed everything.

I unfollowed/muted all ppl on Twitter/IG who talk about news and politics. Muted hundreds of keywords.

Turn news into “pull only”. Don’t let others push it on you.

The impact has been incomparable. I feel happier & more balanced.

The less choices you have to make everyday, the better

Make a few important decision everyday, autopilot the rest

A few good choices throughout the day will make for a better day

Which makes for a better week
Which makes for a better year
Which makes for a better life

Изобретатель это не тот, у кого много идей, а тот, кто не боится их воплощать в жизнь.

Більшість людей, живучи свої життя, схожі на господиню, яка так переймається тим, щоб усі гості були задоволені і все було ідеально, що забуває, що це ж її День народження святкується.

Зовсім не встигає насолодитися святом. А потім весь вечір миє брудні тарілки.

You will definitely die wishing you spent more hours at the office and away from your kids, loved ones and passions. Trust the billionaire sociopath VCs they know what's best for your life and mental health.

life protip: instead of saying "sorry for the late response" instead say "thank you for your patience" I mean, we were using pigeons as a vector for communication for thousands of years, let's not get carried away with this weird sense of urgency, geez barbara your email can wait

If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem. This is a process problem, not a personal problem. This is an ownership problem, not an individual problem.

Your actions are your real priorities.

The original iPhone didn’t have copy and paste. It didn’t import SIM contacts for people transitioning over. It didn’t have maps or GPS. It didn’t have 3G. It didn’t have a camera flash, fingerprint unlock, video recording, front camera, or an app store.

Iteration is key.

Your time is the most important asset you have.

If you keep working on your strengths, you become unique.

If you keep working on your weaknesses, you become average.

Work with your strengths, delegate your weaknesses.

maybe email is the last good platform
✔️ no ads
✔️ no algorithm
✔️ portable data
✔️ muting people/companies baked in

It's odd how society portrays having 💰 money as buying Bentley cars and Rolex watches, when the real thing money should buy you is freedom from institutionalized slavery, aka employment

CREATE before you CONSUME.

Don’t read emails first thing in the morning. Don’t look at your twitter feed. Don’t let distractions interrupt your stream of consciousness.

Grab your cup of coffee and Create.

Even if you’re not in sales, you’re in sales. You have to sell your ideas, your point of view, your suggestions, your value, your…

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.” - Karen Lamb

The easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of most of it.

вообще я убежден, что в современном мире возможность НЕ РАБОТАТЬ - это главная цель и жизненный стимул для любого мыслящего человека

dear world: stop asking me to talk on the phone. i hate the phone.

"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." ~Thomas Jefferson

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" -Wayne Gretsky

Rich people have nothing in common. They seem totally random.

But powerful people—one thing is absolute: they wake up early every day.

Don't react. Respond.

"There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." - Morpheus, The Matrix

People don't want to get rich, they want not to have to worry about money. We created a society where you can only do that by getting rich.

Almost all the great entrepreneurs I admire are people who put their life's work into one main company.

If you don't hate stuff enough, you can't be passionate about creating better things.

OH: you know sitting is the new smoking.

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around." – Steve Jobs, 1997.

Don't wait. Life goes faster than you think.

Собственно говоря, лишь очень немногие живут сегодняшним днем. Большинство готовиться жить позднее. Джонатан Свифт

People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten

Don’t quit

As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.

The primary rule of user interface design is that users won't read a single god damn word you put on the page.

Goal in life is to always be busy.

Busy doing nothing.

Travel before you have kids.

“Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty." Tim Ferriss

The only way to get what you want in life is to repeatedly say no to what you don't

In the modern world, don’t minimize your risks - maximize your opportunities

Most people overestimate how well other people are doing and underestimate how well they’re doing.

Leadership tip of the week

Be specific. People can’t read your mind for extra context. Make expectations clear and you’ll get better results.

Steve Jobs: "there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product."

Your ability to simply show up consistently separates you from 99% of competitors.

I believe we are incredibly lucky that email is free.

No one can compete with you on being you.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

The secret to getting rich is the same as the secret to being an outlier in most fields: to enjoy doing things that make one rich.

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.

Не помню, у кого я нашел эту картинку, но 2-3 часа в день на книги это круто. Тем более заставить себя снова и снова перечитывать "основу", а не бегать в поисках shiny new things каждый день.

When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us. We know how growing from four to six or eight employees is a huge move. We know that it’s during those growth moments you need a system to help you keep everyone on the same page, and help your expanding teams be more self-sufficient. Being roughly the same size as our customers was a product-focused, mission-oriented decision we made then and have stuck to ever since.

One of the side effects of using the iPhone App store so much is that it's started to fundamentally alter my perception of software pricing. So many excellent iPhone applications are either free, or no more than a few bucks at most. That's below the threshold of impulse purchase and squarely in no-brainer territory for anything decent that I happen to be interested in.

I’m excited to finally be letting the world know that I’ve moved onto a new opportunity after three years at Toptal. I've founded Integral Labs, a company that will allow me to work more closely with many companies on a variety of projects. For those wondering, I'll still be fully remote.

While this article touches on my personal thoughts and experiences, I hope it’ll provide a framework for others looking to make important and often difficult career decisions, in a world where change is the only constant.

A guide to avoiding burnout and establishing balance in your life

There are three key concepts that I want to tackle in this piece. The first is for those who think that they don't have enough time and why I feel this notion is often misplaced. The second is to highlight the benefits of sticking with a job and why successful people are best at risk mitigation, not maximization. And finally, the third will isolate some improvements that I think we can all make in our approach to thinking — moving past just indie making and working full-time, these concepts will hopefully help you optimize within a bigger box or perhaps remove the box entirely.

Donald Knuth, a renowned mathematician and recipient of the Turing Award (considered the Nobel Prize of computer science), retired from using email in 1990.

He issued a public statement on his Stanford faculty page, which I saved to Evernote 1–2 years ago. I think of it often, and my favorite portion is below:

“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Many of us know the vague benefits and aim of delegation — to build teams who can share the workload so that you do the highest expression work that only you can do. But in practice, we hoard tasks and become a bottleneck. Conduct an audit using the six T’s to determine what tasks make the most sense to offload: if a task is tiny, tedious, time-consuming, teachable, time-sensitive, or you’re just terrible at it, delegate it. Check in with yourself frequently (even daily) to examine what’s on your plate and ask: What can you and only you do? How can you delegate the rest? For two weeks, keep a list of all the things you’re doing that might fit one of the six T’s, and notice how much time you can free up for your most important priorities.

There’s a famous story about an executive that hired Edward W. Deming to spend a week with his team and offer recommendations on how to improve both their own performance and the performance of the organization they led. Word has it that Deming arrived on the first day, said “hello,” and then walked straight to the corner of the executive’s office to sit down. He stayed there, sitting silently for the entire day as the executive went about his daily activities.

One of my favorite soundbites is: if it hurts, do it more often. It has the happy property of seeming nonsensical on the surface, but yielding some valuable meaning when you dig deeper

When I was getting ready to join Kickstarter as VP of Engineering, Chad Dickerson (who was the CEO of Etsy when I worked there) offered to send me a bunch of advice. Chad had been a CTO multiple times before being CEO; he knew that this executive-level role was brand new to me, so he offered to help give me a steer and a foundation as I walked into this totally new territory.

I read Agile is the new Waterfall at first with disgust, then with horror, and then finally with a meager amount of very qualified approval.

Don’t be fooled: Becoming a new manager is deceptively difficult.

No matter how many leadership books you’ve read or conversations you’ve had with mentors – the transition to becoming a manager is precarious.

Even with a stellar team, chock-full of strong expertise, it’s hard to create a long-lasting company. The tenacious workers that make it through the initial challenges of forming a company face the complicated task of aligning the company towards a common goal that seems ever-changing (in a competitive and fickle landscape).

Do you ever wonder how successful companies continue to navigate and grow? I often wondered how the companies I admired knew what direction to go — and it became apparent that the trick was being almost irresponsibly aggressive in growing key objectives with a talented group of people.

Engineers looking to grow their career in people management are sometimes flummoxed by the myriad of titles and roles out there. What exactly is the difference between a Manager and Manager II? Senior Manager and Director? This is made further complicated by these titles not meaning the same thing across companies. For example, a Director of Engineering in a 50 person startup is a very different role than a Director of Engineering in a large public company with 10,000+ engineers.

"It's never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot

If you never try, you'll never know.

When you say "Thank god it's Friday", I hear "I hate my job".

STOP wishing and START doing!

"Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming." - Richard Branson

no one is gonna give it to you. you gotta take it.

Make things that you wish existed.

There's always better. There's always faster. There's always more. But there will never be another now.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. - Bill Cosby

If you don't build your dreams, someone will hire you to build theirs.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” ― Aristotle

If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”―Eleanor Roosevelt

Remember, mondays are fine. It's your life that sucks.

Go solo Take 100% ownership Pay people if you need them Avoid drama

Criticism is easy. Creating something worth criticizing is the hard part.