Substrate

Everything contains some silence.

“I have always felt like this blog is my refrigerator. I make something, or I clip out something I like, and I put it on the refrigerator. The next day, I go and find something else to put on the fridge.”

“But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies,’ if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.”

All my English teachers talked about the importance of finding “your voice.” It always confused me because I knew we all had so many voices, so many audiences, and my teachers seemed only to really want the kind of voice that sat with its legs crossed, reading the New York Times. I didn’t have to work to find that cross-legged voice—it was the one education necessitated I lead with. What my English teachers didn’t say was that literary voices aren’t discovered fully formed. They aren’t natural or organic. Literary voices are built and shaped—and not just by words, punctuation, and sentences, but by the author’s intended audience and a composition’s form.

My friend Lara Hogan published an email I had sent to her way back (“Advice for a new executive”) and it turned out to be super-helpful to a lot of people based on the engagement with h…

I’ve written about the class I’d like to teach, but what I’ve been thinking about lately is the class I’d like to attend. Not necessarily now, but when I was growing up. In the 6th grade, let’s say…

Last night, Twitter gave its users the option to switch back to a purely chronological timeline. Meanwhile, today we updated the "Show the best Tweets first" setting. When off, you'll only see Tweets from peop

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.”