Interesting Things
Collection of links to things I found interesting and tend to come back to.
Impact
- Impact, agency, and taste
- excellent essay about how to increase your impact
- agency = make things happen
- taste = pick the right things
- excellent essay about how to increase your impact
- Agency levels
- Level 1: Report problem, walk away
- Level 2: Identify causes
- Level 3: Present multiple solutions
- Level 4: Recommend specific solution
- Level 5: Fix it yourself + inform
- new hires should start at level 4 and move to 5
- Agency - Talent
- another breakdown of why agency is so important and talent / skills alone are not enough
- high talent + low agency => frustrated geniuses
Software Engineering
How to avoid complexity:
-
Cognitive load is what matters
- the best writeup about how to write maintainable code
-
- edgy style, do not agree with some parts but overall good advice
Commonly used terms
-
- why corporations invest in open source?
- why META releases AI models for free when OpenAI and Anthropic keep them behind API?
-
- when you optimize something that touches only a small part of your problem, it will not bring large overall benefits
- => choose improvements that have large area of effect
- explanation why speeding up coding 10x still does not speed up development 10x if the bottleneck was waiting for manager’s sign off anyway :)