Substrate

More Facebook drama, this time from an interview with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. What was most noteworthy, though was the response.

“24/7 reachability also hurts good docs practices. When people couldn’t get ahold of each other at all hours orgs had to design for redundancy, i.e. write things down such that they could be understood by someone else. But there’s a whole generation of workers and even companies that never experienced that.”

“I think technical people are just people who try to understand.”

“That is why I mark April 9, 2012, as the day yesterday became inevitable. Letting Facebook build the business may have made Systrom and Krieger rich and freed them to focus on product, but it made Zuckerberg the true CEO, and always, inevitably, CEOs call the shots.”

I’m hearing a lot about hiring mandates in my social circle these days. My friends are being told that their next hire has to be a

Everyone likes to talk about leadership—we are culturally conditioned to view success as a progression through leadership positions—but there is far less

“But, for writers, maybe it’s not just returning to the things we love… maybe it’s embedding the things we love in new things that we write that keeps those fish alive.”

macOS Mojave is here, and can be downloaded directly via the Mac App Store. Making the Mac More Mac-Like The release is a bit of a weird one. In some ways, Mojave doubles down on what makes the Mac...

Previous to joining Pivotal Labs, I didn’t do a whole lot of pair programming. Hoo boy. It’s been a little over two months since I started, and the number of hours I’ve spent solo…

“‘I just don’t think people like making lists of their friends. It’s not how we think about our friends. It’s a pain to make a wedding list, a holiday party list. Nobody likes to do that, to exclude people.’”

There’s a lot of advice on product floating around out there.But something I don’t see enough (and what I wish I learned earlier) is to start developing a personal philosophy on product - both what makes good product and how to build it.— Avneesh Kohli (@avneeshk91) September 23, 2018

reasoning about the system should be done recursively on its structure. ​ good software design is ultimately an art. ​ another example of reasoning via an interface. ​ I suspect that interfaces are in fact synonymous with compositionality. That is, compositionality is not just the ability to compose objects, but the ability to work with an object after intentionally forgetting how it was built. ​ can interact in complex ways that block understanding ​ More generally, I claim that the opposite of compositionality is emergent effects. The common definition of emergence is a system being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and so it is easy to see that such a system cannot be understood only in terms of its parts, i.e. it is not compositional. Moreover I claim that non-compositionality is a barrier to scientific understanding, because it breaks the reductionist methodology of always dividing a system into smaller components and translating explanations into lower levels.

“One way of looking at the difference between progressive and consistent habits is that the former are about managing growth, while the latter are about managing decline.”

A legendary Kenyan marathoner has once again redefined what humans are capable of.

Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.

Super fresh homescreen. Search bar. Swipes. And more….

Every September since Apple released the Apple Watch, we’ve seen a brand new version of watchOS come out that improves the experience. Here’s a brief recap: * watchOS 1 (Apr 2015): way more functionality than needed, and super slow * watchOS 2 (Sep 2015): slightly faster, and better APIs for

“They’re winning, but they don’t just want to win the race. They want to win the race while driving the best-looking car on the track.”

“We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong. Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.” “But the switch towards taking on a practice and discipline is admitting to yourself that you suck and you want to get better.”

Jonny Sun is staying in business with HarperCollins Publishers courtesy of a three-book deal following the success of his “Everyone’s a Aliebn When ur a Aliebn Too.”

I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that…

Whenever someone says, “You should do a parenting book!” I think of this tweet.