Why sell zines?
Substrate
On Product Intuition
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
On Compositionality
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.
How Important is Growth?
“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.”
New zine: Help! I have a manager!
A New World Marathon Record Almost Defies Description
A legendary Kenyan marathoner has once again redefined what humans are capable of.
Girl
Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.
Transit 5.0
Super fresh homescreen. Search bar. Swipes. And more….
watchOS 5: The BirchTree Review
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
Apple Watch Series 4
“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.”
A willingness to be bad
“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.”
Swift 4.2 Released!
Fear
Jonny Sun Signs 3-Book Deal With HarperCollins
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.”
Engineering Productivity
I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that…
Work
My parenting book
Whenever someone says, “You should do a parenting book!” I think of this tweet.
"Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji"
Light-skin-tone symbols are used far less often in the U.S. than their darker counterparts. Does shame explain the disparity?
Upside-down Smiley Face
In June 2015, the Unicode Consortium blessed us with a handful of new emoji including a burrito 🌯 and a cheese wedge 🧀. Perhaps the most think-piecey new addition to Unicode 8.0 was the inclusion of various skin-tone options for the hand-gesture and people emoji, which sparked
“Short Talk on the Total Collection”
The price of relevance is fluency
“You see, there is no "Twitter mob", there's only people. And people shape culture, and culture evolves. But in the past, the powerful could keep themselves isolated from the way culture evolves, if they wanted to.”
Alone at the Movies
Signed talk story about the writer, in 1977, seeing “Star Wars” twenty-one times over the course of the summer, mostly by himself... I was using the …
Social networks & the online reality of identity
Like everyone else, I watched the Washington Social Media circus with interest. A lot of words were used. Crocodile tears shed. Promises made. Bouquets of derision thrown. But no one actually said …
Later
CEO Coaches
“An athlete without a coach is incomplete. So, why don’t we think the same way about coaches for CEOs?” “Matt’s coaching methodology is to act as a shadow CEO one day a week, including sitting in on all the one-on-one meets with the senior team and on the leadership meeting. Matt’s initial focus was on improving my personal productivity with a set of tools like GTD and a series of audits of my time and processes.. Once I was convinced of the benefit, he moved his focus to my senior team and the rest of the organization.”
Facebook really messed up Instagram
Growth hacks everywhere — and it’s about to get even worse
Habitation
Reading aloud
I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits. The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my
“For Grace, After a Party”
“and the warm weather is holding.”
“What’s your manager’s job?”
“what's your manager's job?”