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Software is not labor-intensive. Not many people are necessary in order to produce good software… What makes or breaks a project, it’s the amount of FOCUS developers can pour into it — RedBeardLab

Senior executives report that the lack of developer talent is one of the biggest potential threats to their businesses — The Developer Coefficient 2018, Stripe

Despite the number of developers increasing year-over-year at most companies, developers working on the right things can accelerate a company’s move into new markets or product areas and help companies differentiate themselves at disproportionate rates. This underscores the most important point about developers as force-multipliers: It’s not just how many devs companies have; it’s also how they’re being leveraged — The Developer Coefficient 2018, Stripe

We can quantify the impact of engineering time spent maintaining old code rather than writing new code. According to one analysis, an engineer engaged in purely non-innovative activity destroys nearly $600K in employer market value. On the other hand, the average engineer, working on a combination of maintenance and innovation activities, adds $855K in market value to their employer.

Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called ‘the meta’.

The best marketers are therefore the ones who advance the best practices the fastest to keep ahead of the mainstream, or are able to identify and develop playbooks for new channels before the old ones become too inefficient to fight in. The quicker they identify new channels and the longer they keep their playbooks secret, the better the marketing game becomes for them.

New tools mean new options. New options mean new viable strategies.

In the late 70s, the meta changed again. A man named Michael Milken pioneered the use of an obscure financial instrument called the high-yield bond, more popularly known as the ‘junk bond’. He quickly realised that these junk bonds could be used to raise immense amounts of capital for the purpose of corporate takeovers, with little to no cost to the acquiring company. Such ‘leveraged buyouts’ (LBOs) — which issued debt on the target company’s assets, not on the parent company’s books — changed the rules of the takeover game in ways that persist till today. The players that emerged to take advantage of this innovation, the ones who skated to the edge of the meta? We know them today as private equity firms.

What is interesting about the meta is that metagames can only be played if you have mastered the basics of the domain. In MtG, Judo, and Splendor, you cannot play the metagame if you are not already good at the base game. You cannot identify winning strategies in MtG if you don’t do well in current MtG; you cannot adapt old techniques to new rules if you don’t already have effective techniques for competitive Judo.

What is true in sports is also true in real world domains like marketing and business; it is true even if you are aware of the meta’s existence. The nature of the metagame demands that you play the base game well. It lives on top of the pattern-matching that comes with expertise.

This seems like an obvious thing to say. But as with most such things, the second-order implications are more interesting than the first-order ones. For instance, because expertise is necessary to play the metagame, it is often useful to search for the meta in your domain as a north star for expertise. The way I remind myself of this is to say that I should ‘locate the meta’ whenever I’m at the bottom of a skill tree. Even if I can’t yet participate, searching for the metagame that experts play will usually give me hints as to what skills I must acquire in order to become good enough.

So while the dream is composability through open-source, the reality seems to be interoperability through APIs

In my opinion, this is how the ecosystem comes together. Companies/people with motivation to build/connect to better unlock financial accessibility/compatibility

The other comes from within. This is what drives me to do things when there isn’t a carrot or a stick. Hobbies are one activity driven by this. But what I was looking for was something that I could do for a living that was also driven by this type of motivation: the intrinsic kind.

Regarding the $1,200 per month limit, I'm not sure what the rules are, but perhaps you could set up a corporation that takes on the freelancing jobs and then pays you a salary of $1,200 a month? That way you wouldn't have to turn down a job for paying too much.Maybe have the corp owned by a trust rather than you personally?I wouldn't want you to get in trouble and lose the disability, though, so talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about before doing any of this stuff.

In NextJS v13, the framework's compiler got 17x faster. Why? An extensible Rust-based platform for JavaScript compilation and bundling called swc. The compiler went v1 in 2019, and Vercel hired the lead developer in 2021.

For those of you who find yourselves feeling skeptical of this kind of "heat seeking," you should ask yourself what kind of investor are you? What kind of founder are you? Are you more focused on building long-term business value? Or are you focused on getting as wealthy as possible, as quickly as possible? Because those are not necessarily the same games. And whether its building long-term business value, or getting rich, it's certainly possible (even most likely) that you'll lose one of those games. But if you don't know what game you're playing? Well, then you're sure to lose.