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Is it a compelling product, though? It’s a famous Steve Jobs axiom that technology is not enough, that you don’t make compelling products — let alone entire platforms — starting from advanced technology and working backward. You start with a vision for the product and platform experience and then create new technology to make it real.

The "life is a game" mental frame puts you in a fun frame of mind. You just can't wait to see what happens next. Maybe you'll lose, perhaps you'll win -- who cares! As long as it's interesting, keeps you amused, engaged, and learning.

Chances are the second proposition sounded more appealing to you. But look again, both these propositions are identical. The second version attracts more positive answers[1] because it's framed as cost whereas the first version is framed as a loss and who wants to lose?

"Life is a game" mental frame Once a motherfucker get an understandin' on the game, and what the levels and the rules of the game is, then the world ain't no trick no more, the world is a game to be played. -- 2Pac in "Starin' Through My Rear View"

The risk anxiety can paralyze you and unless you act you're just making your situation worse. One handy mental frame to adopt in this case is "life is a game, and I'm playing it." If life is a game, then you're there to play it.

In situations where it's painful, you have to remember that time will go by, nothing lasts forever, and that you'll eventually be on the other side. What's important now is to execute!

A excellent technique to couple with the worst-case scenario mental frame is what's called "negative visualization". An age-old technique invented by the Stoics in ancient Greece, you visualize or meditate on the worst. Like, actually imagine it happening. If it does happen, you're already at peace with it, and if good or neutral thing happens then it's ecstatic!

There is a lot more to this, and I'll try to keep this as a live document. But for now, I need to get back to playing the life game because time won't wait for me, and really, what's the worst that can happen? I want you to remember though, that I'm not only my job, it's true that I learn a lot from it, but I contain multitudes!

There is a way to bypass this and have software control how network links work, and for that we need to think about Unix conceptually for a second. In the hardcore Unix philosophical view: everything is a file. Hard drives and storage devices are files. Process information is viewable as files. Serial devices are files. This core philosophy is rooted at the heart of just about everything in Unix and Linux systems, which makes it a lot easier for applications to be programmed. The same API can be used for writing to files, tape drives, serial ports, and network sockets. This makes everything a lot conceptually simpler and reusing software for new purposes trivial.

discovered

Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones.

There’s a line I love: People don’t remember books; they remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories.

Pay close attention when someone you admire disagrees on a topic you’re passionate about.

When those two things align – a person you admire disagrees with you about something fundamental – pay close attention. There’s a good chance this is information you’ll want stored in your head.

An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability. Maybe your portfolio surged during a bubble, your company hit a monster valuation, or you negotiated a salary that exceeds your ability. It feels great at the time. But reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment in equal proportion to your delusions – plus interest.

None of those are about settling or giving up. It’s about avoiding a certain kind of psychological debt that comes due when reality catches up. There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.”

Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.

There are a few reasons I can think of: It has never been easier to npm install (or yarn add) your problems away, whether it’s a library to format dates or some animation library. Third-party scripts like analytics, chat, or whatever your marketing team stuck inside GTM. First-party code.

But why is it steadily growing? I would say it’s due to product requirements and user expectations for rich interactive experiences. The more features we add, the more code we generate, the more JavaScript we ship.

Furthermore, there is somewhat of a correlation between DX (developer experience) and UX (user experience). To better understand this, we can look at this slide from a recent talk that Shai Reznik (international speaker and Founder of HiRez.io) gave:

The main reason for this is hydration, which is the process of attaching behavior to declarative content to make it interactive.

It’s like playing a video game — you progress on a level and collect loot, but then you accidentally die and have to restart the level from square one.

“Astro Islands represent a leading paradigm shift for frontend web architecture. Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page. Unused JavaScript is replaced with lightweight HTML, guaranteeing faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).” —Astro website This is pretty awesome, as it also allows you to write components in almost any frontend framework you like. You can make an island interactive on a case-by-case basis and with specific directives to control hydration, which they call partial hydration.

The problem is not that there is too much JavaScript; rather, the JavaScript must be eagerly downloaded and executed. (As I’ve mentioned, many existing systems have lazy loading, but only for components not currently in the render tree).

In a nutshell, with hydration we run our code on the server and then on the client. Resumability means running the app once, pausing execution, and then resuming where we left off, just on the client. It’s kind of like how VMs work. A virtual machine can run an app, say a text editor, on an operating system and then be stopped, moved to another machine, and then resumed.

Resumable frameworks are not new. For almost a decade, Google has been using Wiz (an internal framework at Google), which powers Google Search and Photos. Marko, a framework from eBay, is promising resumability in their next version.

Qwik is made by 3 performance nerds (they said it, not me 😉) that have 4 frontend frameworks under their belt.