Why David Yach Loves Go | Google Cloud Blog
Learn all the reasons David Yach, industry veteran and Director of Engineering at Google Cloud, loves to use Go for software development.
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I Miss Heroku's DevEx
Posted on 2022-05-12
GopherCon UK 2021: André Eriksson - Software development reimagined
Why is it that after 50+ years our primary tool is still a simple text editor?
We can do so much better. In this talk I present my vision for a much more holistic developer experience, that deeply understands the application we’re building, and supports us in this endeavour.
Feedly – More signal, less noise
Keep up with the topics and trends you care about, without the overwhelm. Make your research workflow efficient and enjoyable. Experience the power of RSS.
Growing in vs. growing out - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
Carl Pei in conversation with Kunal Shah
On 3rd August, 2022, Carl Pei (founder, @Nothing) sat down with Kunal Shah for a fireside chat. What followed was an hour’s worth of shared curiosities between them.
Kunal and Carl started companies which brought new products in fast-growing categories, financial services & mobile phones respectively. Both left these companies, to return with all-new takes. Kunal, with CRED in 2018, and Carl, with Nothing in 2021.
In conversation, they cover all about what entrepreneurship looks like in the roaring 20s, building high-performing teams in startups, what makes powerful brands, and choosing the right problem to solve.
Bonus: Carl Pei discovers the word “cringe” and Kunal Shah reveals his meme dealers.
Never miss an update on any of the upcoming sessions. Subscribe and switch on notifications for exclusive #CREDcurious conversations.
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
0:58 Session opening
1:17 The beginning of Nothing
3:54 Setting up a hardware tech company
5:18 How to build a brand around your business
11:47 The values which define Nothing
17:32 Taking business decisions
22:02 Insight behind the design
24:25 Vanity versus utilitarian functionality
25:16 Dealing with crisis while building a company
28:38 Unique traits of the Indian market
30:36 Creating the right market environment for a premium phone
32:58 Carl’s role at Nothing
34:18 Identifying mediocre talent
39:11 Kunal’s role at CRED
42:58 Question and answer session
49:05 How Nothing got its name
Follow CRED for a rewarding experience:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CRED_club
Instagram: https://instagram.com/CRED_club
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/credapp
Join the conversation about CRED curious on Discord: https://discord.gg/CHCAbdj3Wu
Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories? | Hacker News
Brief Notes on the Idea Maze
Some brief observations on the cases so far. Use this as a starting point, not an authoritative take.
Software to avoid the software people
GENERAL MAGIC - Official Trailer - YouTube
Big Beliefs
A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple.
Little Ways The World Works
If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important.
Encore on Twitter
“We're currently focused on building a next-gen cloud infrastructure provisioning system. In essence, it's an intelligent planner that not only models your app's required infra but will also take any of your arbitrary constraints into account. (1/x)”
FOMO? YAMO.
Fear of missing out on software? You ain't missing out.
Modern Indian Careers. Why IT Services is in decline and so… | by Sidu Ponnappa | Medium
Why IT Services is in decline and so many engineers hate their jobs
An Interview With Replit Founder Amjad Masad
An interview with Amjad Masad, the co-founder and CEO of Replit about Replit’s long-term potential, Masad’s background growing up in Jordan and how that made him a fighter, whether Repl…
You also have to remember this is pre-GitHub acquisition so dev tools as a space was really nonexistent and it wasn’t getting a lot of funding at the time.
One immediate insight that I had is that developers are one of the most important people, job, role, whatever you want to call it, for the future. And so, “Okay, how can you make this thing, the sorcery magic — whatever you’re going to call it — this modern magic accessible to more people?”
Some of the benefits including access to every open source package in the world, built around this open source operating system called Nix. Actually Nix is not really an operating system, it’s an operating system generator. So it’s a functional programming language that generates an operating system based on inputs and those inputs are packages.
. Do you see Replit in the long run bridging that gap? Or is this a situation where you’re going to be so easy to use and so easy to get started and then you’ll just keep building features over time that you’ll capture the next generation and you don’t need to worry about the gray beards over there saying like, “Oh, that’s trivial. I could have built that if I wanted to.”
So a lot of computer revolutions, a lot of these big companies start kind of simple, start like a toy, and a lot of the initial beachhead market is hobbyists, teachers, schools and things like that, and that’s a great place to be in.
That’s an inevitability, whether we build it or not, and I think we’re going to build it, and part of the reason I think we’re going to build it is because people have been saying we’re going to get killed by Microsoft or Github or whatever for a long time, and it hasn’t happened.
I think one of my favorite Steve Jobs moments was at the All Thing Digital conference, I think it’s now called Code. They were pressing him on Flash, “Why haven’t you built Flash?” And what he said was amazing. He said, “We can only have a few big bets and we want to bet on the future of the web and HTML5, and we think Flash is the past.”
Our bet on Nix was we were the first major startup to do that. Every step of the way we’re taking really contrarian bets that end up becoming mainstream in a few years, and I bet you Nix is going to be mainstream in a year or two. I think we have a very good talent for figuring out where the future of programming and technology and software is going and we want to bet on that.
One way to think about Replit is, if Airbnb and Uber, the sharing economy, found idle assets in people’s homes and cars, Replit is finding idle assets in brains. There’s a lot of people in the world that can contribute massively to the Internet and software and we’re going to bring them online and we’re going to augment them with technology and AI and they’re going to be able to build the future. That’s a part of the bet
They figured out how to build this creative economy around games and a lot of people that grow up playing Roblox want to program Roblox. This is a very cool company and we have a lot of overlap in audience. So yeah, I mean if you’re sitting down and you want to program, you have a choice of programming Roblox or programming Replit to build an app, and have more choice of software and have more choice and more freedom to do things and have a lot more access to open source and things like that, but also Roblox is a compelling platform to be a creator on.
They try to gamify their onboarding, but what the hell is a Git Commit? How am I going to understand what a Git Commit is if I can’t code? And so we’re really at the absolute beginning of a process and we teach people the tools, and in the process we’re also going to change the tools to make them better.
AM: In 2013, I read this paper called On The Naturalness Of Software. I actually have it on my website because I love that paper so much. So this paper — I read it fairly early on and it basically says code is like natural language. They actually have this statistical reason for why they think code can be thought of as natural language. An
We actually haven’t really focused on growth, growth happened on its own just because the product is good. Now, we’re focused more on commercialization and we’re going to bring a ton of what we call Power Ups.
Contributing to other projects, bounties, all sorts of stuff. We’re going to build an economy on top of Cycles.
What It Takes to Forge Your Own Category with Braze Co-Founder and CEO Bill Magnuson (Pod 601 + Video)
How do you create a concept that not only doesn’t yet exist but hasn’t yet been imagined? Bill Magnuson, Co-founder and CEO of Braze, remembers his
Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles
Gartner Research on Understanding Gartner’s Hype Cycles
The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring
Plus! Smartphones and Distributed Law Enforcement; Actors as IP; Microtransactions; Partnerships; Streaming; Diff Jobs
Steve Blank Mapping the Unknown – The Ten Steps to Map Any Industry
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step Lǎozi 老子 I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm. After a bit of catch…
e could object I handed him a pen and a napkin and asked him to write down the names of companies and concepts he read about that have anything to do with the semiconductor business – in 30 seconds.
As you keep reading more materials, you’ll have more questions than facts. Your goal is to first turn the questions into testable hypotheses (guesses). Then see if you can find data that turns the hypotheses into facts. For a while the questions will start accumulating faster than the facts. That’s OK.
Drawing a diagram of the relationships of companies in an industry can help you deeply understand how the industry works and who the key players are. Start building one immediately. As you find you can’t fill in all the relationships, the gaps outlining what you need to learn will become immediately visible.
My suggestion was to use the diagram in the third mapping pass as the beginning of a wall chart – either physically (or virtually if he could keep it in all in his head). And every time he learned more about the industry to update the relationship diagram of the industry and its segments. (When he pointed out that there were existing diagrams of the semiconductor industry he could copy, I suggested that he ignore them.
What he didn’t know was that this was only the first step in a ten-step industry mapping process.
The Idea Maze.pdf
Will the Metaverse replace PCs?
Meta thinks it will, and they are betting everything on it.
Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt
Parenting : Who is it really for? | Derek Sivers
This is just one of many options | Derek Sivers
Assume nobody is going to help you. | Derek Sivers
When you assume nobody is going to help, you have to use all of your strength and resources.
You can’t wait, because there’s nobody to wait for.
It keeps your focus on the things in your control — not outside circumstances.
It’s productive pessimism.
Saying no to everything else | Derek Sivers
“I didn’t talk to anybody during that year…
I didn’t hang out.
I just worked.
I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself.
I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again.
This was it, do or die.”
The Superiority of ‘Trial & Error’
Nassem Taleb and a mozzarella video show us how trial & error is actually a superior life strategy.
When seen in this light, the Buzzfeed crew couldn't have possibly failed. They had some randomness in their attempts, but each attempt cost little when the outcome was failure, and they could afford to make repeated attempts, slowly adjusting from the results of each batch.
Taleb goes further, in fact. He argues that you don't have to be smart if you have convexity in your payofff. You don't even need to have a plan. You merely need to make repeated bets where your positive outcomes outstrip your losses. So long as you are sufficiently rational — that is, you don't repeat the same mistakes twice — you are guaranteed to come out ahead. And not just a little ahead, way ahead.
For instance, if you choose a career that benefits from convexity, you are likely to outdo the people who choose a career without convexity. This is why successful business owners do much better than successful software engineers over the long term. Provided the business owner plays optimally, she only needs one win to make up for her losses; the software engineer on the other hand has to make incremental progress over time.
The strategy that is optimal differs in both fields: for entrepreneurs, the optimal strategy is trial & error (as many bets for as low a cost as possible during a single career); for software engineers, it's better to stick to one thing and build up expertise for that thing over the course of a career.
He goes a little overboard in making fun of 'academic types' in his books, but the main thrust of his argument is still valid: you don't need to be the smartest person to win in convexity competitions — you merely need to be the most rational. The ones who are smart but who aren't rational are more likely to plough on ahead and repeat their old mistakes, instead of learning from each iteration and changing key variables for the next trial.
“This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men that made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in—a trial and error system.” — Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
cpressey/Facts-about-State-Machines: I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated
I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated - cpressey/Facts-about-State-Machines: I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated
Richard Feynman and Narrative