Microblog

posts tagged 'Microblog'

Tech Case Studies

I’ve always wanted to find great case studies from people building things. Not high level blogposts dictating “this is how you should do X”, but “here’s the 20 things we tried and the data we had at the time, and what we learned.” I started a side project at some point to aggregate them, but I literally couldn’t find many examples online.

Came across two of the best examples I’ve ever seen today:

The Commoncog Case Library, specifically Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley about a YC company battling against their former employer
Dan McKinley worked at Etsy and Stripe, and his keynotes are full of specific examples and projects, along with their outcomes.
- Egoless Engineering covers engineering team culture and structure
- Choose Boring Technology discusses how to choose languages and frameworks, and how that factors into product development
- Data Driven Products Now! is a framework for deciding what to work on that’s not simply A/B testing

As a longtime donor, got to visit the Internet Archive!

They protect 50+ petabytes of web history over the past 28 years — nearly 835 billion web pages and 44 million books.

Each drive rack holds 2.88 petabytes of data, so these 3 racks are ~2% of the archive counting backups.

Inspired this weekend by Kygo’s latest album release, filmed on a mile-high rock outcropping in Norway, featuring a full-size Steinway piano, orchestra, and pyrotechnics.

My favorite moments / timestamps: 4:30, 16:40, 18:30, 35:50, 56:40

Perhaps the most important insight NASA has gleaned from studying team dynamics—in space and on Earth—is the preciousness of one trait in particular: a sense of humour. Studies of crews overwintering at the South Pole show that a confined group needs people to fulfil various roles, including leader, storyteller and social secretary. But the most important task by far is that of the clown, a person who is funny and also wise enough to understand each member of the group and defuse tensions.

How to prevent conflict on the way to Mars

A boat called Cumberland, with a red bottom, hoisted on stilts in a shipyard, on a sunny day with blue skies.

History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation. It’s never too late to change a story.

The past is not true by Derek Sivers

Mike Krieger: I’ll share a funny anecdote about the Explore experiment. Facebook has all these internal A/B testing tooling and we hooked into it and we ran our first machine learning on the Explore experiment and we filed a bug report and I’m like, “Hey, your tool isn’t working, that’s not reporting results here.” And they said, “No, the results are just so strong that they’re literally off the charts. The little bars that show it literally is over 200%, you just should ship this yesterday.” The data looked really good.

Threads and the Social/Communications Map - Stratechery

📷 Bad news: I accidentally left my bag on a train at Grand Central Station today.

Good news: While waiting at the Lost & Found, I got to enjoy these art deco-style MTA posters from George Pataki’s time as governor. (And shortly thereafter, got my bag back.)

Art print called The Subway of a dimly lit train platform in art deco style An art deco style art print called Twilight Train of people standing outside a futuristic looking train An art print called New York Dreams of the New York skyline

Hit a 400 day streak learning French on Duolingo today! Started as a New Years Resolution in 2022 and became a nice daily¹ ritual that feels productive. I wish the exercises were a little more conversational, but still highly recommend.

(ish — you get to take some days off and maintain the streak) ↩︎

Gorgeous reimagining of the tape recorder from Teenage Engineering, complete with a spinning tape reel, “off the record” mode, and voice memos. I love single purpose devices — have been thinking of getting an old iPod, and this isn’t helping.

teenage.engineering/products/…